Archive of Our Own

“You mind if I smoke?”

Ever since Captain America, aka Steve Rogers, contacted me for an interview, I’ve been imagining how it would go. I knew, logically, that underneath the stars and stripes Rogers had to be a normal man, but I couldn’t get over the assumption that the conversation would be all about truth, justice, and the straightedge American way. Then Captain America rides up on a Harley and asks if he can smoke. I’m obviously underprepared. 

There are smoke alarms in my apartment, but I open up a window and give him an old ramekin to use as an ashtray anyway.

“How long have you smoked?” I ask. It’s as good a first question as any. 

He laughs.

“I don’t know if I should say twenty years or a hundred, though there was a good eighty years I kicked the habit.”

I laugh too, a little more manic than I probably should. His situation is almost impossible to believe, like something out of a comic book. After the Battle of Manhattan, I remember how long I held out believing it was really him, how the media went crazy and blurry pictures of him and the other Avengers circulated like wildfire. 

“I was eight I guess,” he continues.

“Eight?” I parrot, disbelief evident in my voice.

The corners of his eyes crinkle as he smiles.

“Yeah, the Depression hit me hard.”

He lights the cigarette and takes a drag, chuckling on the exhale.

“Nah, I had asthma pretty bad as a kid, Doc prescribed me asthma cigarettes. I smoked my first real cigarette on my thirteenth birthday after Buck’s dad gave it to me, told me I was a man now. Well, I ended up hacking up a lung so bad that no one ever offered me another one. I picked up the real ones in the army after-”

He gestures to his body.

“Missed the habit of smoking the asthma ones. Course, Jim or Buck would always fleece ‘em offa me in poker.”

“Buck is Bucky, right? James Barnes?”

Rogers nods.

“Yeah, sorry, but half the shit that comes outta my gob is gonna be about him.”

He doesn’t sound very sorry.

It’s also incredibly jarring to hear Captain America swear. His Brooklyn accent isn’t thick, but it’s there, and the curse rolls off it like butter. I try to combine the foul-mouthed New Yorka in front of me with the old-timey sounding Captain America you hear in the vintage war bond commercials, but it isn’t working very well. I’m silent for so long that Rogers asks: “So, where’d ya wanna start?”

I gulp, nervously shuffling my papers as Rogers knocks his cigarette ashes into the ramekin. Once again I’m struck by the insanity that a national icon chose his first interviewer to be a poor grad student in a tiny apartment in the Bronx.

“Why don’t you start with what brought you here? After all, you haven’t given an interview since 1944, even though you’ve been back for almost two years.”

Rogers takes a drag on his cigarette, thinking hard.

“I s’pose it was the misconceptions. I kept quiet ‘bout it during the war because I represented hope to people; I was bigger than myself and knew better than to go flapping my gums, but now… the world’s had Captain America for nearly a century, I reckon it’s my turn.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, was there anything specific that brought it on?”

“Ask whatever you want, that’s the whole point of me being here,” he says with a smile, “Yeah. It was this… Tony sent it to me-”

“Tony Stark?”

“Yeah. He sent me a clip of some Fox news shit, and this cuntlicker- Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am, I won’t swear again if it offends you.”

I’m still not sure what was weirder, hearing Captain America say the word “cuntlicker,” or the absolute sincerity of the apology that followed. I laugh a little, incredulous.

“No, I want this to be as authentic as possible. Please, continue.”

He nods. 

“Anyway, this… correspondent said something about how we celebrate Christmas in America, and how he was gonna call up Captain America to punch the next fella that told him Happy Holidays.”

“And you didn’t like that?”

“No, it was a sock to the gut. I’m a Catholic, God above and my Ma know that, but I’ve celebrated Chanukah since I was nine.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he says with a wave of his hand, “We’ll get to that later. And I chose you ‘cause I liked your piece in The Advocate.”     

My eyebrows rocket off my forehead. I'm a history major at NYU with a focus on queer history, and last semester one of my professors helped me publish an article in The Advocate, a magazine with a focus on LGBT+ issues. My piece had been a study on Dragballs in the 1930s and how they influenced modern drag today.

“You did?”

“Yeah,” he says, “You’re a good author, did thorough, accurate research, and treated everyone you talked about with respect. I appreciated it. Plus, you’ve got a picture with me in it.”

If I had been drinking water I’d have spit it out, Looney Toons style.

“I do?”

He laughs at the expression on my face and takes another drag of his cigarette before putting it out and lighting a new one.  

“We’ll get to it,” he promises.

Captain America has been to a Dragball. Captain America celebrates Chanukah. Captain America swears like a sailor and is chain-smoking in my living room. I can practically feel the earth move from my high school history teacher rolling in her grave.

It’s only been fifteen minutes.  

“Well,” I say, for lack of something better to say, “Would you like to just start at the beginning?”

I had planned out a whole series of questions, half expecting the interview to be like pulling teeth, but it seemed like Steve Rogers had a lot to say, so I was going to let him say it. 

“Guess it all starts with my ma.”

He crosses himself with the hand not holding the cigarette.

“May she rest in peace. Her and Da came over from the Isle back when Irish need not apply. Had a hell of a time getting a job, a place to live, but they made it work. I was born a few years later, and by the time I grew up it wasn’t as bad.”

“Your father died when your mother was pregnant, right?”

“Yeah, in the Great War. Or…”

“We call it World War One now.”

“That’s it, World War One. Here’s hoping we never have another one.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I reply.

We clink together our thrift shop mugs and sip our coffee. He’s kind enough not to make a face at the quality, but I’m guessing army coffee in the ‘40s was grosser than my grad-school budget grounds. As I sip I contemplate his aversion to another war. Steve Rogers was always fighting, from the sand of the grade-school playground to the mud of Nazi Germany, but I suppose that sort of thing has to take a toll on a man, even one as glorified as Captain America. 

“Where was I…” he contemplates, oblivious to my train of thought, “Ma raised me by herself. I was premature, and I’ve always been sick, but I was always good and quiet.”

He laughs.

“My ma used to get our neighbor to watch me when I was little, but the day Ma had her interview for the hospital Mrs. Donahue’s son got hurt at the factory, so my ma put me in her biggest purse, told me to be quiet, and went into the interview. Worked there ‘till she died.”

He smiles proudly while I giggle.

“How old were you?”

“About a year I think.”  

“What a good baby!”

“Well, the doc thought it was just ‘cause my lungs were weak, didn’t have enough energy to cry, but Ma said I was saving it all up for later; I was a chatterbox once I learned how to talk. I slowed down once I hit grade school, but once I learned English I picked right back up again.”

“English? What was it you were speaking before?”

“Gaelic, it was all we would speak at home.”

“Do you still speak it?”

His smile fades, reminiscent.

“Sea, a dhéanaim. It’s the last thing I have of her.”

“She sounds like a nice lady.”

“She was. A little too nice, really. She had a boss who would always be mean to her, nothing was done right by him. She’d come home from work hours late because he’d make her scrub bedpans twice, or stick her with the worst patients. She knew it too, but never made a fuss, just ‘Yes sir’ and quiet. One time a grocer refused to take her money, said he didn’t deal with Irish dogs. She just put her money back in her purse and turned to leave, but I socked him square in the jaw. She told me once I probably stood up for everyone else cause she didn’t stand up for herself. I’m sorry-”

He doesn’t cry, but he blinks back tears; sipping his coffee and clearing his throat. 

“I haven’t talked about her in a long time. ...It’s the little things, you know? She loved Coca-Cola, so that’s what I drink when I’m missing her; the good kind with real sugar in the glass bottles. And fiddles! She taught me to play on the one my Da brought from the Isle. She’d sing along to my playing while she cooked. She was a great cook; I almost cried at a restaurant last week ‘cause they served Irish soda bread. My ma used to make the best in New York. Bucky tried once, after she died, but he smoked while he was kneading the bread and got ashes in it.”

We both laugh.

“Did you eat it?”

“Nah, threw it out the window, gave the birds a feast. He was just as torn up ‘bout her dying as I was though, called her Ma and everything.”

“Did you call his mother mom as well?”

“Yeah, Ima and Tatti, until…. The thing about Bucky-” 

His voice breaks on the name and he looks away, bringing a closed hand to cover his mouth. Looking out the window, the smoke from his half-forgotten cigarette pluming across his face, he seems anguished, terrified, like David about to face Goliath.  

“Bucky was the reason,” he says finally, still looking out the open window, “You asked me why I haven’t given an interview until now, and I can give you a hundred bullshit fucking answers, but it really comes down to Bucky,” he gives a watery laugh, “Everything in my life always comes down to Bucky.”

I stay quiet. The moment is obviously intimate, and even though I’m the interviewer I feel as though I’ve intruded in some private thought. Rogers has never been a public man, and he seems to grapple with that now more than ever; eyes unfocused as smoke dances across his face.

“Bucky was always a private man… more so than me. He…ever since I came back I’ve fought myself about it. Would he want me to tell the truth? Go on with the lies that we’ve held so far? If the situation was reversed, and god-”

His tears spill over, tracks of unknown loss across his cheeks.

“I wish it were. If it were reversed I would trust him… Trust him to tell our story. He was always better with words, you know? If he were here he’d tell our story like it’s the next Iliad, but I’m just… stumbling through.”        

I feel lost again, unmoored against countless years and intimate emotions; an outsider to the outsider.

“How did you meet?” 

It had been one of my original questions, one of my safe questions, but it feels wrong now, sacred. He turns to look at me, startled, as though he had forgotten I was here, and breathes a laugh, scrubbing a hand across his face to wipe his tears.

“It feels like- Sorry, I’m sorry I’m such a fucking mess.”

“Hey, it’s… you’ve been through a lot, I think you’re entitled to be. I don’t know what I’d do if I woke up in the future.”

He gives another breathy laugh.

“I wouldn’t recommend it. You’ll have a heart attack when you see your grocery bill.”

“Oh yeah! I didn’t even consider price inflation. That must have been a shock.”

“I thought I was going crazy. We used to pay nine cents for a loaf of bread, six if we got it a couple of days expired. Buck used to make it himself most weeks though; I did most of the cooking, but I wasn’t strong enough to knead it properly. Oh, sorry-“

His face flushes.

“I avoided your question about Bucky by talking about Bucky. I’m not very good at this, am I?”

I shrug.

“I think you could talk about whatever you wanted and people would still read it.”

The twist of his mouth suggests he’s not happy to be reminded of his celebrity status, but he doesn’t deny it.

“It still wouldn’t be polite. The question was how we met?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s strange to think about. I’ve always been so wrapped up in him I can hardly remember a time when I wasn’t. It feels like we were in the womb together.”

He pauses for a moment and then lights another cigarette. My girlfriend is going to kill me when she gets home and smells it, but how do you turn down a national icon? Or a grieving man?

“We met in first grade actually. We were the only two who didn’t speak a lick of English, so we sat in the back of the class and jabbered to each other like a pair of fools.”

He smiles at the memory, big and bright, and the image of it makes him look heart-breakingly young.

“So Barnes knew Gaelic too? All the history books said his family was from Italy.”

Rogers laughs, the corners of his eyes crinkling.

“They were, we didn’t understand each other one goddamn lick. He spoke mostly Yiddish though, it was what they spoke at home.”

“Yiddish?” 

When Rogers had contacted me about conducting an interview, I had purposely scheduled it an entire month out so I could prepare as much as possible. I went crazy reading biographies, consuming documentaries, and even watching the half-fiction Hollywood dramatizations. Never in a single one of them had they mentioned Barnes was Jewish. While his faith had never been confirmed, it was speculated he was Catholic, just like Rogers. 

Rogers doesn’t seem to notice my incredulity, or, if he does, he credits it to something else. 

“Yeah, so we just sat there little-kid blathering to each other in two separate languages until we learned English. I think the first real conversation I had with him was a whole three months after we met.”

“What did you talk about, if you don’t mind me asking?”

He blushes and his smile goes a little shy.

“Well, we made sure we were each other’s best friends. We were both scared to death the other would run off after he could talk to the other kids, but we were steadfast.”

“I thought Barnes was older than you, why was he in the same grade?”

“He is, about a year and some change, never let me forget it mind you, always going on about how I should ‘respect my elders.’ That year was the first year they started really enforcing mandatory school in New York. His father had asked him if he wanted to go the year before, the year he should have started, but he said no, so he just started working at the shop.”

“The grocery store his parents owned?”

“Yeah. All the clientele were either Jewish or Italian, mostly both, so he never had to learn English. Then the next year a cop knocks on the door and says he’s gotta go to school. They had the choice of putting him in second grade, but seeing as he couldn’t speak English his folks thought it best to just start fresh.”

“Then he met you and history was made.”

The smile fades from Roger’s face.

“Yeah… history. You know Bucky would have loved it now? He was wild about technology, loved reading science fiction and dragging me to the Stark expo. He would go crazy for Google, I just know it, and smartphones! The whole world right in your hand! He was always smarter than me. Always had his eyes stuck on something mine slid right past, elbowing me in the ribs and asking, ‘Hey Stevie, how do you think that’d work?’ Him and Howard got on like a house on fire, always taking things apart and making new things, though half the time it ended in explosions.”

He laughs a little: soft, reminiscent.

“God’s name, I always wondered who he would have been if he hadn’t dropped out of school.”

There’s a scene in one of the more popular films, “Man with a Plan,” where Barnes drops out of school, the handsome Jan-Michael Vincent smirking as he says, “You’ll find better gals in a dance hall than a library.” But the intelligent, curious, book-loving Barnes Rogers is painting doesn’t seem to fit the womanizing slack-off that the media often portrays.

“He dropped out of school at seventeen, right? It would have been his… junior year?”

Rogers nods.

“That was one of the worst fights we ever had.”

“How so?”

He opens his mouth but no sound comes out, flushing nearly scarlet. His face plays out a hundred emotions, so many that I feel I’m looking at a flipbook, and his jaw works as though he’s trying to find the words. Finally he sighs, drags his lower lip through his teeth, sighs again, and speaks. 

“My ma had just died, God rest her soul-”

He crosses himself again, a good Catholic boy.    

“-and I didn’t… well, I didn’t always look like this.”

Chuckling and bashful, he gives a playful flex of his muscles. 

“I was sick, a lot, all the time, and it cost money. Money for pills, syrups, blankets, doctor’s visits, hospitalizations, everything. We were lucky, my ma worked at the hospital, and Bucky’s family had the shop, but it was the Depression, and with my health I couldn’t hold a steady job. So, when Ma died I was sixteen, colorblind, half-deaf, asthmatic, and chronically ill. Ma left me a little money, but it was only enough to cover the funeral and about a month's worth of rent. Bucky’s folks had just had baby Emma, I couldn’t ask them to take me in or even give me work; they needed the space and the money. I thought I could…”

He trails off and his jaw works angrily.

“Never mind what I thought. But then one day Bucky turns up on my doorstep with a suitcase in each hand, asking me to put dinner on while he unpacks.”

A laugh comes over him then, but his eyes are far away and glassy. 

“He would always do shit like that. Come in the room like eggs in coffee, like whatever grift he was pulling was the most natural thing in the world.”

“What did you do?”

“Ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing. Then he tells me that he got a job at the docks, making 25 cents an hour, and what does a fella have to do around here to get some boiled potatoes? Then he says he’s already called round the school to drop out, and- Christ, I almost socked him right there.”       

“You didn’t want him to move in with you?”

“Of course I did, but I didn’t want him bumping gums about dropping out. I mean, I was never a dimwit, but he was always the smart one. He probably wouldn’t have been the next Stark, but he really could have been somebody famous.”

“He’s famous now,” I said, and though I was trying to be helpful I was soon the recipient of an ice-cold glare. 

“For being dead,” he spat, “He could have been famous for what he did while he was alive.”

The words hit hard and true, painful in their reality. Who would have Barnes been if he had lived? Gabriel Jones went on to become a famous poet, Jim Morticia a world-renowned activist, Dugan one of the most decorated war veterans to ever serve. All his squadmates accomplished fame outside of the Howling Commandos well after turning 30, and Barnes had died at 28. Another bright light snuffed out by the horrors of war. 

“I’m sorry,” the Captain says, rubbing a hand across his face and bringing me out of my reverie, “You were trying to be nice. I shouldn’t blow a fuse.”

“I can’t imagine it,” I say instead of accepting his apology (Captain Rogers, if you’re reading this, I do accept your apology!), “Having everyone act like your life is history.”

“It is history. ...Only, the thing is, nobody’s got it right. You know what we did, that night? That night he dropped out of school? You wanna know why I didn’t bloody his nose and march him right the fuck back to Jefferson High?”

His chest heaves, quick and terrified, and once more he becomes the statue of David, beautiful and horrible with terror bald in his eyes. He requires no answer, and stares at me unseeing and defiant, volcanic in his ardency. Sitting in my living room, on my second-hand Ikea couch, he looks more ready to take on an army of a thousand men than a grad-student armed only with lukewarm coffee and the Apple voice memos app.  

“I told him I didn’t need his charity, didn’t need his pity, and he asked me who I was tryin’ to fool-” 

A sob rips out of him then, aching and wretched, and I’m paralyzed in fear, discomfort, and fascination. 

“Because everyone knows it’s a man’s duty to support his wife .” 

The word hits me like a bullet to the chest, piercing my lungs as it forces the puzzle pieces together: the drag balls, the Advocate, “inseparable on both the schoolyard and battlefield;” Steve Rogers was-

“And then he kissed me, and, Christ , I’d been dying all my life but suddenly I was alive. Nothing else mattered as long as I had him, he could have dragged me to the bottom of the fucking ocean and I would have been the happiest man in the world. He loved me. Me! An ugly mug standing five foot tall, who couldn’t even pay for his own medicine. He loved me like I love him and now he’s gone. ”

Fierce, shuddering sobs punch out of him as tears run rivulets across his face, mapping his features in grief. I’m astounded and struck still by his untamed sorrow, half wanting to sob and half wanting to run. It had been two years since Rogers had come out of the ice, and another few weeks (for Rogers at least) since Barnes had fallen from that train in the Alps, but he grieved as though he had just been told, as though I had just given him a letter of condolence. I had never thought myself good with emotions, and it was clear that Rogers considered himself a widow. How do you comfort a man who’s lost his husband, his lover, his childhood friend? 

“Do you want to go get some food?”

I have exactly zero idea what possessed me to say that, and as soon as the words left my mouth I resigned myself to never being able to publish this interview, but Rogers just starts laughing, relief pouring tangibly out of him. He takes a while to calm himself, deep, racking breaths turning into hitched whimpers, and wipes the tears from his face.

“Yeah… yeah that’d be good. I could really use an egg cream.”

“There’s a deli a few blocks from here.”

“They got burgers?”

“Best in town.”

“Fuck yeah, let’s do it then,” he says, his flippant words clashing with his watery eyes, his cheeks pink and tear-stained.

As he stands from my couch it seems for a moment as if he takes up the room, blocks out the sun, and then he offers me a hand and I take it. Suddenly he’s not so big anymore.

We putter around my living room, looking for the keys he had discarded on my bookshelf and my Keds under the couch as he sniffles and discreetly wipes at his face. I wonder how many people have seen him like this. Barnes, surely, but who in this modern world? Do the Avengers see him cry, or do they, too, fall into the trap of mistaking the shield for the man?

Seeing as I’ve now got a good track record for stupid questions, I ask another one as I tie my shoes: “Do the Avengers know about you and Barnes?”

The looseness he’s acquired from thinking about egg creams tightens back up, and he shifts from foot to foot uncomfortably, eyes flicking to the door. 

“Nah, I’m lily-livered. They’ll find out when this article is published, I suppose. They’re good people, great people, but it’s hard looking ‘round for coppers every day of your life and then suddenly, what, people accept it? Don’t get me wrong, this time, here, now, where there are pride parades and marriage… . I’d give God and heaven to have Bucky with me now. But still, I’d rather be called a bluenose than a faggot. Tony still thinks I’m some kind of virgin.”

“Do you think anyone on your team would call you a faggot?”

He shakes his head no before I even finish the question.

“No, they’re not like that, probably all that’ll come from it is Tony trying to set me up a Grindr account, and a pat on the back from everyone else, but still, I worry. When I was a kid, those who didn’t worry ended up jailed or lynched. Hell, it even happens now. A fag is a fag is a fag. I imagine there’ll be a good share of folks calling for me to be stripped of my rank after this is published. Fuck ‘em. I’m not hiding anymore.”

He still looks scared, the same scared he’s been since he brought up Barnes, but there’s a grim layer of determination under it now. With the set of his jaw I’m suddenly struck by how much a prominent queer role model like him would have helped me when I was coming to terms with my own sexuality. I tell him so.  

“Oh yeah?” he says with a smile as I lock my door behind us, “I thought you might wear comfortable shoes, but I wasn’t sure.”

“Wear comfortable shoes?”

He flushes.

“It’s slang, we used to say that about lesbians. Not that all lesbians dress differently, or that anyone could clock you, I just-”

“Don’t worry about it, I like it. You should see my girlfriend though, never a day goes by without her in heels. It’s exhausting just watching her.”

“Tell me about her, how did you meet?”

We spend the rest of the walk talking about my girlfriend, and by the time we get to the deli I realize I haven’t asked him a single question. Somewhere along the way it stopped being an interview with Captain America and started to be a conversation with a friend. He’s got that way about him, as if you’ve known him all your life. I haven’t met many celebrities, but I imagine not many of them would be genuinely interested in hearing about how my girlfriend mixes her own berbere.  

        We sit at a booth and he orders four egg creams for us, one for me, three for him. He didn’t ask me what I wanted, but his ordering for me doesn’t feel condescending or chauvinistic, it’s more like he’s excited and wants to share his excitement with me. He asks me what’s good before he even opens the menu, even though he wanted a burger, and under the bright fluorescent light, I think about how weird it is that I’m eating lunch with a national icon.   

Two hours ago I had hidden a picture of me and my girlfriend kissing because I didn’t want Captain America to call me a dyke. 

I order the pastrami, and he orders one too, along with a hamburger, a salad, and two sides of fries. He orders us both strawberry milkshakes after the waitress says it’s buy one get one free. 

“Do you eat that much food at every meal?” I ask him, eyes wide after the waitress leaves. 

He shrugs, taking a sip of his second egg cream. 

“My metabolism is about four times as fast as a normal man. I can technically go weeks without food- had to, during the war one time- but it feels terrible, like my stomach is eating itself.”

“You had to go weeks without eating?”

He shrugs, as though it isn’t a big deal.

“We got... trapped I guess you could say, in the hills of Italy for a couple'a weeks. We had already been running low on supplies and couldn’t get extracted cause the area was surrounded. Had to lay low ‘till we could get out. I kept sneaking my rations into Bucky’s bags, ‘cause Jesus, that man could eat you out of house and home, ‘specially after…” he trails off, something indescribably sad washing over his face. He picks back up after the waitress drops off our milkshakes. 

“Anyway, took about a week for Buck to notice I wasn’t eating, I had- well, I had put us on different watch rotations, but he chewed me out worse than my ma ever did when he found out. It was almost funny, ‘cause he couldn’t really yell at me or we’d risk being discovered, so the whole time he was just whispering as loud as he could, throwing his hands all around and getting his fingers in my face… he used to talk real big with his hands you know. I’d always say: ‘Hey! Watch where you’re throwing those hands, you’re gonna bloody my nose!’ And he’d say: ‘A shortstack like you? No chance! But I’ll give ya a warnin’ when I start kickin’.’”

Rogers’ voice goes deeper when he imitates Barnes, and the Brooklyn accent goes from background to foreground, the ‘A’s drawn out long as taffy. I realize with a start that there aren’t any soundbites of Barnes talking; this is the closest I’ll ever get to hearing James Barnes’ voice. 

“He still called me shortstack after I… grew,” Rogers continues, unaware of my revelation, “The other Commandos thought it was hilarious. It became this running joke: don’t send Rogers scouting ‘cause he’s too short to see anything.” 

Our food comes then, and Rogers apologizes to the waitress and helps her arrange his many different plates on the table. There’s so much food I feel like a medieval lord at a feast. 

“Have anything you want,” he offers when he sees me eyeing his fries, “I like seeing people eat.” 

He blushes, takes a sip of his milkshake. 

“Sorry, that sounded weird. I was really poor, growing up, and then in the war, everything was rationed. I like… I don’t know- I like knowing that there’s food, that people are fed. I-”

He flushes again, an even deeper pink, and avoids my eyes. 

“This is… I don’t know- embarrassing, stupid maybe? Anyway, sometimes I just like to open my pantry and stare at the food. I always keep it stocked and it looks like…  a dream or something.”

We let the statement hang between us, and suddenly the food is so much more than an unplanned lunch; it’s security, the promise of being well-fed. I don’t respond, I don’t know how, but I take a handful of his fries and put them on my plate. He smiles at me like that’s the best thing I could have done. 

While we eat he asks me questions; where I grew up, what grad school is like, how I like New York; and it’s not until after the plates are cleared that he steers the conversation back to himself. 

“It feels wasteful sometimes,” he confesses, one broad hand gesturing to the empty plates, “Before the serum I could get full off a peanut butter sandwich.”

“Do you miss your old body?”

Rogers furrows his brows. He spends a minute thinking before he answers.

“Yes and no. When I-” he breaks off to chuckle, “transformed makes me sound like Bruce. I still haven’t found a good way to describe it.”

“Got ripped?”

He laughs in earnest, and I join in. An old man at a table near us gives us a glare, muttering something about ‘kids these days’, which, to his chagrin, only makes us laugh harder. 

Once again I’m amazed how familiar Captain America treats me, like we’re friends instead of strangers. It reminds me of the happy hours I attend with my fellow students, and I’m struck by the fact that Rogers is actually two years younger than me, he’s only 28.

“I don’t really know if I can tell you which body I like better,” he says after our fit of giggles, “cause it came with a total life change. Obviously I like not being sick, being able to move better, seeing color,” he leans forward, eyes wide, “I mean, I had congenital cone monochromacy, I could only see in black and white, just like television, well- how television used to be, and then I got the serum and-” he mimes an explosion with his hands, “All of sudden… I can’t even describe it, but it was beautiful, still is.”

“And your other body?” I ask, unsure how it could even compare. 

He deflates, slumping back against the vinyl booth. 

“I know I-” he cuts off, looks down, “I, um… I know how to use Google. I’ve seen the jokes people made about me before I ‘got ripped’,” his lip quirks up for a second, then he frowns, “I know people think I was ugly, but I liked myself, I liked how I looked. Sure I was scrawny, and I had a hard time finding clothes that fit, and maybe broads weren’t lining up to dance with me, but I didn’t need that. I liked myself, and, more importantly, Bucky liked me. He had these-” he holds up his hands, looks at them as though he doesn’t recognize them, “-huge hands, strong hands, and sometimes when we’d get to dancing he’d spread his hand across my back and I’d just… I don’t know, feel safe. And sure he’d give me shit for being short, but all we ever did was give each other shit, didn’t mean anything by it, and when he’d get to drinkin’-” Rogers closes his eyes, and for a moment looks so wistful that I almost want to cry, “he’d look at me like I was… something beautiful. He’d look at me and say, ‘How’d ya get so pretty, baby? How’d a pretty thing like you end up with a schmuck like me?’” 

As he lets out a sigh, the overhead lights catch the tears clinging to his lashes.

“I think I like this body more, to answer your question. But when I die… when I’m with Bucky again I’ll- ...well... I think I’ll be 98 pounds in heaven.”

He brings his palms to press against his eyes, as though he’s seeing something behind his lids he wants to preserve, and when he brings his hands back down the tears are gone, his eyes bright, if a little red. 

“Can we go back to your place?”

“Geeze, buy me a drink first,” I tease. 

Hey, listen: I’m an interviewer, not a therapist. I already said I wasn’t good at emotions.

Thankfully, Rogers seems to like my humor, laughing as he stands. He helps me up, then throws a hundred dollar bill on the table; more than enough to cover the sixty dollar check. 

He shrugs when he sees me eye the money.

“Sixty years of backpay; I’m sure she needs the cash more than I do.”

Some third-grader stops us only a block after we start walking, and Rogers gladly takes a photo with him, asking who his favorite Avenger is and comically faking offense when the kid answers ‘Thor’. Surprisingly, he ropes me and the kid’s mom into the conversation as well, and by the time we go our separate ways it feels more like bumping into friends than a celebrity encounter.     

Only a block later I get catcalled by a couple of guys, and before I can do anything Rogers is already yelling at them to “fuck off”, stalking toward them menacingly before they run away, practically pissing themselves.

“Sorry about that,” he tells me, as though it was his fault.

“Can I get you to walk around with me all the time?” I ask, only half-joking. 

He shrugs, grinning.

“Only outside of nursing home visiting hours, I gotta make time for my other friends.”

We both laugh but it’s subdued, the joke hits a little too close to home for the man out of time.

“Do you still have friends from before?”

He shrugs, kicks a rock, and puts his hands in his pockets. It’s got to be lonely, being him. 

“A few. Most people are gone. Add in AIDS and military service to the inevitability of time and there’s not a lot left for me. I’ve still got Peggy, Gabe’s wife is still around, and my friend Sugar lives at a retirement community not too far from here.”

“Sugar?”

He laughs.

“Yeah. She was me and Buck’s neighbor for a while. Introduced us to the scene. Her real name’s Alice, but her wife always called her Sugar ‘cause she was so sweet, you know, like the song. Name just stuck.”

“Her wife?”

He nods.

“We couldn’t get married, but we’d have ceremonies anyway. Sometimes they’d be at a club, but most of the time it was just at someone’s house. They had theirs at a club, they were both really popular. It was a great time, danced so much my feet hurt for days.”

“A lot of stories say you didn’t know how to dance.”

He flushes.

“Sure I do. Me and Buck were floorflushers back in the day. I just- um… I don’t know how to lead.”

“You danced with Bucky?”

“Mostly, but he didn’t mind if I danced with other guys, so long as they kept their hands to themselves, or… what do you call women who dress like men? It’s something different now.”

“Transgender?”

“No, those are men, I’m talking about the women who dress like men. I’d know it if I heard it.”

I think for a minute.

“Butch?”

“That’s it!” He agrees with a snap of his fingers, “I used to dance with them a lot, ‘cause they knew how to lead and Bucky wouldn’t get jealous.”

“Would he get jealous often?”

Rogers shakes his head before I even finish my sentence, reaching forward to open the door to my apartment complex for me.

“Not really, we trusted each other. Jealous isn’t a good word I guess. Protective maybe? Sometimes a smudger would try to get fresh with me. A lot of belles like a little guy like me-”

He frowns.

“Like I used to be, ‘specially since I was kind of a chorus moll. Out of the two of us, I was the one with the temper, but he’d really get in a lather if someone got handsy or kept dogging after me. Didn’t happen a lot though, most everybody knew we were married.”

  I’m so surprised by the statement I drop my keys. 

“You were married?”

“Yeah,” he answers casually, reaching down to pick them up. 

He opens my own door for me, then hangs the keys on the hook after we get inside. 

“Like I said, it wasn’t legal or anything, but it held a lot of weight in the community.”

“Did you have a ceremony?” 

Laughing, he flops back down on the couch, crossing his legs at the knee. He doesn’t look effeminate, per se, but his body language is distinctly different from this morning.

It’s because now he knows I’m gay too, I realize with sudden clarity.  

“Hardly. First time we walk into a queer bar he introduces me to everyone as his wife. I was so happy I felt like my heart would burst out of my chest.”

He smiles shyly. 

“That could have been my arrhythmia though. Bucky used to put his ear over my heart and say it was better than a mystery novel; you never knew when the next beat would hit.”

“Was that common? Being called husband and wife instead of husband and husband? I assume he was the husband.”

He shrugs, not seeming to give it much thought.

“I don’t know, maybe? We didn’t really do labels then like people do today. Our existence was illegal anyway, so we just did whatever made us happy. Bucky was my husband, I was his wife, that’s just how it was. Nobody really gave a damn, other than the fact we were both off the market. And let me tell you, I had to practically beat people back with a stick, he was a real dish.”

He snaps his fingers.

“That reminds me, if you have a copy of your article I can show you the picture with us in it.”

Seeing as I’ve been trying to find a way to bring that picture up ever since he mentioned it, I’m pretty sure I break the sound barrier scrambling to where I keep the magazine.

He uncrosses his legs and leans forward when I toss the Advocate on the coffee table, more carelessly than I would if I wasn’t about to get a firsthand account of my research. 

Treating the magazine better than I did, Rogers gingerly flips through the pages, lips pursed until he finds what he’s looking for.

“Here,” he offers, pointing at the picture with a nervous smile. 

Since Rogers mentioned the picture, I’ve been cycling through them in my mind, half-convinced that he had been lying to me. Now that I’ve got the photo in front of me, I can see why I couldn’t identify him.

Rogers and Barnes aren’t the focus of the picture, it’s a wide shot of the club, but they’re tucked away by the bar, hiding in plain sight. Barnes is sitting on a barstool, a glass of whiskey by his elbow, and Rogers is standing between Barnes’ splayed open legs, a small hand resting on his husband’s thigh. I couldn’t recognize Barnes because his face is tucked behind Rogers, either to whisper in his ear or kiss his cheek. Rogers’ face however, is on full display, but he’s almost unrecognizable in drag. 

That’s right. Captain America, the star-spangled man with a plan, is dressed in Full. On. Drag.

This is probably the best day of my life. 

“I love your dress,” I tell him breathlessly, still reeling from the revelation.

It’s a glamorous velvet number, form-fitting and cinched tight around his small waist. The sleeves fall mid-forearm, and the dress falls just below the knee, but it’s far from being conservative. In fact, Barnes’ hand has found its way into the daringly high slit in the skirt to grab hold of Rogers’ thigh. There’s no padding in the bust, but the fabric coquettishly slips off one shoulder, drawing the eyes to his pale skin and delicate bones. It fits him better than anything else he was photographed in pre-serum.

“Thanks,” he answers softly. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see him sag a little in relief. It takes a brave man to tell people things like this, even today. It’s got to be even more nerve-racking knowing that I’m going to publish it, name attached, in my article.

“I like your makeup too,” I add, being sure to give him a reassuring smile, “I can never do a good cat-eye.”

It’s a genuine compliment; he’s got a full face of makeup that would make any movie star jealous. Paired with a sly grin and half-lidded eyes, Rogers’ makeup overshadows his short, masculine hair and makes him look like an actress from a film noir, beautiful and a little dangerous.

  “Thanks. I used to do it for the other girls too, sometimes. They had to pick out the colors of course,” he adds with a laugh, “but as long as they did that I could do the lines right.”

“Who picked out your colors? Barnes?”

Rogers laughs again.

“Oh no, he was a smart dresser, but he didn’t really know anything about makeup. Also, being poor as dirt doesn’t really lend itself to a full vanity. I’d do a red lip, brown eyeshadow, and black cake every single time, but you’re seeing it how I’d see it. It was all black, white, and grey to me.”

“Cake?”

“Not cake that you’d eat. It was… a block of makeup. You’d wet a brush or a wand, put it in the cake, and then put it on as your eyeliner or mascara. They lasted forever, I’d only have to buy one every couple’a years. Course, I only wore makeup when we’d go to clubs, some of the girls would wear it at home too.”

“The girls?”

“Girls like me, the girls that were only girls some of the time.”

The statement is casual, only a little hesitant, but I feel like I’ve been socked in the gut. You’d think after so many revelations about Rogers’ personal life I’d be used to surprising information by now, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. 

“Could you elaborate on that?”

“Maybe?” he says with a nervous chuckle, “Like I said, we didn’t really label anything back in the day. I was a woman to my friends and a man to everyone else.”

He pauses for a moment, turns the statement over in his mind. 

“Actually, that’s not right, I’ve never been a woman. It’s hard to explain I guess. I never really gave it much thought until I got out of the ice; I did a lot of research then, but I don’t think I fit under any label.”

He looks back down at the picture. 

“I only dressed like that when we were going to a club, every time else I wore men’s clothes. But even when I was wearing men’s clothes my friends would call me ‘she’ or ‘her’, but not even all the time. It was just all mixed up I guess. Bucky would talk about me and say, ‘he’s the best gal I could ask for,’ or people would say ‘Steve? She’s a good guy.’ Stuff like that. I wasn’t really he or she. Or… I was always he, and sometimes she.”

“Do you have a preference for your pronouns?”

“ Don’t call me she in the article,” he answers quickly, “That was only for my friends, or the other queer people at the clubs.”

He chews his bottom lip for a moment.

“I don’t really know how to describe it, but there’s something different about a queer person saying it.”

I nod, and then I nod again.

“No, I totally get what you mean. I call myself a dyke all the time, I’m proud of being a dyke, but if a straight person called me that-”

“I’d punch ‘em in the kisser.”   

I laugh, thinking back to when he threatened the catcallers.

“I’m sure you would. I bet you would even before the serum.”

“Safe bet,” he says with a smile, “Half the fights I got into were son-of-a-bitch homophobes calling me and my friends slurs. It’d drive Bucky up the wall, he was so afraid I was really gonna get hurt.”

“So people didn’t call Bucky slurs?”

“No,” Rogers says, as though the mere thought was ridiculous, “He’d sock anybody and everybody that called me a fag, but Bucky was a man. I mean sure, he was gay, but he was a man. Even when I was wearing men’s clothes I was always a little bit-” he holds up his arm and exaggeratedly limps his wrist, “-but you really couldn’t tell with Bucky. He always played his cards really close to his chest. Funny too, Bucky only ever liked men, but I was always the one getting clocked, even though I like gals as well. Used to make me crazy.”

“Did you ever have any other partners?” I ask, wondering if there’s a good way to bring up Peggy Carter.

He shakes his head.

“No. Like I said, we were man and wife from the time I was sixteen. I told him he could date women if he wanted, just to get his folks off his back, but he wouldn’t do it. Thank God too, ‘cause I would have been a jealous bitch, even though I knew he didn’t like broads.”  

“He needed to get his parents off his back? Did they know he was gay?”

Rogers falters, shrinking in on himself more than he has any other time today.

“Could you um… could you give me a minute?”

“Um, sure. I could go get us some waters, beer maybe?”

“I’ll take a beer,” he answers, but he’s not looking at me, he’s looking at the open magazine, at him and Bucky.

Giving him privacy, I go into the kitchen and mess around on my phone for a few minutes before grabbing a beer for him and a water for me. He looks as though he’s steeled himself when I come back. He thanks me for the beer, but his mouth is set in a grim line. He seems determined. 

“Being gay was a crime in the ‘30s,” he tells me when I sit down, “I know I’ve talked a lot about the club scene, but it was very, very dangerous to be gay, even in those clubs. The clubs were often owned by the mafia, and, on top of that, police would raid them fairly often. Being gay was practically like being undercover; if you told the wrong person you could get jailed or killed, if the wrong person saw you with another man you could get jailed or killed, if the wrong person saw you in the wrong clothes you could get jailed or killed, if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time you could get jailed or killed. It was very, very dangerous, and you would in no way want your loved ones to be put in that danger. On top of that, there were a lot of misconceptions about gay people and the queer community. There was no Google, and nobody went around asking questions because you could be mistaken for a queer, and you could be jailed or killed. It was a different time.”

He looks at me as though he could impress the importance of his words upon me simply through his stare.

“Okay,” I agree, “It was very dangerous.”

He nods gravely.

“Me and Bucky lived together for years, and we didn’t date any girls, and we only had one bed. It was-” he breathes out harshly, “It was don’t ask, don’t tell. We were fine with it, I was more than fine with it. Bucky’s folks still treated me like a son, you know? I would babysit or tutor the girls if I wasn’t too sick, and they would invite me round for dinner every week or two. I was there for every holiday: Chanukah, Passover, even Yom Kippur, the works. I don’t want to make this sound like Buck’s parents were bad people. They were great people, I still love them, but they were a product of their time.”

He stares at me again. I feel vaguely as though I’m in the principal’s office being scolded for something I didn’t even do.  

“Okay,” I agree again. 

He takes a few deep breaths, then takes a long pull of his beer. 

“When Bucky turned 21, his ma started getting onto him about finding a wife. I think his family thought that I was some sort of… teenage phase, but at that point we had lived together four years already, and we were still going strong. His ma starts dropping hints, you know, that he should start coming to temple more, that there are some girls around his age that he would like, good Jewish girls, three things that I am certainly not. He started going to the synagogue more, to make his mother happy, and that was when I told him he could go out with girls. I thought if he kind of made a show of it his ma would get off his back, but he hated the idea of it. He said he wouldn’t ever step out on me, even if I wanted him to.” 

Rogers smiles shyly.

“He was a great guy, you know. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve him, but he treated me better than I could ask. I was such a burden, being sick all the time, needing the attention, the money… and I couldn’t even hold down a job because of it, but he never made me feel like a bother. He’d pull doubles as much as he could when I wasn’t sick so he’d be able to afford to take time off when I was. It’d run him ragged, I hated to see it, but he’d just kiss me and say that working was as easy as breathing long as he had me to come home to.”

His eyes drift back to the picture for a moment, but he clears his throat and carries on.

“Anyway, his ma started bringing the girls around for dinner when it was clear he wasn’t gonna make a move, or getting him to run errands to houses that just happened to have eligible Jewish daughters who were always conveniently hanging around. It drove him crazy, he hated it. Like I said, even if I was out of the picture he wouldn’t go for women.”

` He takes another pull of his beer, lets his mouth linger so he has a moment to think.

“Then there was this one dinner- and that was the thing, I was still invited to all these dinners, cause as much as they didn’t like Bucky with me they still liked me, so I’d have to sit through an hour or two of some girl getting rejected by my husband. It was so awkward, and that was what pissed Bucky off more than anything, the fact that this was all happening right in front of me. Anyway, there was this one dinner that- and thank the lord it was just the family- that it all blew up. Bucky’s ma started talking about how she had invited this girl, and the girl had to cancel, and it was such a shame because she thought he would really like this one. He said that he absolutely would have not liked this one, and that he hadn’t liked any of the other ones, and that he would never like them, and would she please just stop.”

He takes a moment to breathe and starts picking at the label on the beer bottle. 

“I can’t remember exactly what Bucky’s ma said, but it was something like ‘I don’t know why you won’t give these girls a chance.’ Now, I was always the hothead, but I’m like a match, quick to light, quick to burn out. Bucky though? He was terrible when he got really, truly angry. He was one of those people that would just let it simmer and build up until he just exploded. It almost never happened, but when it did you could always tell it was coming, ‘cause he’d just get real quiet, like the calm before the storm, and his face would just go totally expressionless, like it was carved out of stone. Anyway, he just-” Rogers waves a hand in front of his face, “no emotions, and all of a sudden everyone knew he was about to go off. He looks at his ma and goes, ‘ Really ? You really don’t know? You really have no idea?’”

“Oh, shit.”

“Right? And then-” 

He takes another deep breath.

“-his father looks right at him, and goes ‘Of course we do, but you’re an adult now, you can’t keep playing house with Steve.’”

“Oh my god.”

He nods. It’s obvious the comment still hurts him.

“Bucky just lost it. He started yelling at them, and I’d never seen him yell at his parents before, but he just went crazy. It was terrible. I kept trying to get him to leave with me, ‘cause I knew he was gonna regret saying some of those things later, but he’d bottled it up for so long he just couldn’t. Then he starts yelling about how he’s a fag, and he’s always gonna be a fag, and he’s always gonna be in love with me. Then his ma said something about me, I can’t even remember what, and Bucky-”

He takes another swig of his beer.

“Bucky called her a… he called her a bitch, and his father just cracked him right on his jaw. I’d never seen his father hit anyone before, much less Bucky. Buck was so stunned I was finally able to drag him out of there, get him back to our apartment. He was never really a guy who cried, I knew him all his life and I barely need two hands to count how many times I’ve seen him cry, but that night… God’s name, he sobbed for hours . He went back ‘round to his parents’ house a few months later, to apologize. His father… his father told him that he could come back when he’d broken it off with me, or he couldn’t come back at all. He shut the door right in Bucky’s face. ...It was the last time he ever saw his family.”

“That’s terrible.”

Rogers nods solemnly. 

“Like I said, they were a product of their time, but if anything they were more tolerant than most would be, knowing about me and Bucky for so long, but it was such a shame. If they had just been given time I think they could have come around to it. They never would have liked it, sure, but they had always had a great relationship with Bucky, with me even. I think they could have tolerated us at the very least, if only to spend time with their son.”

He holds up his hands, palms facing skyward.

“But then the war started. His parents shut the store down and moved away because it kept getting vandalized. I know we like to think of America as the heroes of the war, but a lot of Americans agreed with Hitler back then; there were a lot of hate crimes in New York, a lot of antisemitism. That was mostly what Bucky got in fights for, no one ever called him a fairy but they sure did call him a kike. Anyway, by the time Bucky came back from training his folks were gone, he never got to see them before he shipped out.”

Rogers wipes his eyes.

“You know, I talked to Rebecca, his little sister. She passed a few months ago, peace be upon her, but I was… I wanted to know…. I looked at all the stuff about Bucky, everything that I could find- stupid, I know, it won’t bring him back, but there was just… so much left out. I understood, you know-” he points at the photo, “but we tried to hide that. The rest… I was so confused, I mean, people saying he was Catholic? It didn’t make any sense. Sure, he wasn’t as religious as his parents wanted him to be, but he was Jewish. It was such a big part of him; it formed the way he looked at the world, the way he approached the war, even just his everyday life. I mean fuck, he celebrated the holidays, went to temple when he could, ate kosher, he took his faith just as seriously as I take mine! Sure, he celebrated Christian holidays with me and my ma, would even go with me to church sometimes, but as respectful as he was toward my Catholicism, I know that he would hate to be remembered as a Catholic.”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Rogers takes a few deep breaths, calming himself down. 

“Anyway, I went to Rebecca. It was… strange. Strange but good.”

He gives a watery laugh.

“You know, the last time I saw her she was just fifteen years old, and then there she was, an old woman. ...Anyway, we talked for a long, long time. I won’t go into most of it, that’s between us, but she told me they were-” he swallows, tilts his face up to stop the tears from falling, “-they were proud of Bucky, that they lit a yahrzeit candle for him every year, on the anniversary of his death, and that they even-” he lets out a choked sob, “-even lit one for me too. She said they never gave any interviews because they knew if anyone found out about us that we would be... posthumously dishonorably discharged. They were afraid if they talked to anyone, it might be apparent that they hadn’t talked to us in years, and people might start asking why, so they just… kept quiet. His parents asked the rabbi to-”

He breaks off to suck in a shuddering breath.

“-keep the plot next to them open, after they were buried, so that Bucky could be buried next to them if they ever found his- his body. They both died in the ‘70s, and the plot… um, the plot for Bucky…. It’s... it’s still empty.”   

He sniffs.

“I always wonder what would have happened if he had lived, or if he hadn’t been drafted in the first place. It just seems like this… unfinished story.”

I wait a few moments to give him time to collect himself, but the question burning a hole in my gut can’t be contained.

“He was drafted?”

Every. Single. Piece. of literature about Barnes says that he was one of the first to volunteer, that he shared Rogers’ passion for his country. For him to be drafted, the narrative around one of the most famous soldiers in United States history would be changed irrevocably. 

Rogers nods, changing known history with a single dip of his chin.

“We both were. Course, they sent me right back home after they took one look at me, but Bucky… well, I’d never been so disappointed that he was in perfect health.”

“Why didn’t he enlist? Why did he wait to be drafted?”

Rogers turns sharply toward me, face hard.

“He wasn’t a coward if that’s what you’re thinking, he never tried to dodge. He was proud to serve his country, to be on the right side of the war.”

“I wasn’t thinking anything like that,” I reassure, “Being drafted doesn’t change any of the good that he did.”

Rogers blinks at me, as though he wasn’t expecting me to agree. He takes a swig of his beer, looking contemplative. 

“I’m sorry, I just… I guess it’s a sensitive subject. It was because of me really, I guess that’s why I’m so sore about it. I had a lot of health problems. A lot a lot. I know I made some jokes about my arrhythmia earlier, but that was a serious problem. Pacemakers hadn’t been invented yet, and there was always a risk that my heart would just… stop. Brooklyn was hardly the cleanest place back then, and people didn’t know as much about illnesses as they do now, but even so, stuff that would stay in Bucky’s system for a few days would stay with me for a month or more. He’d get a cold and sniffle for a day, I’d get a cold and it would turn into pneumonia; he’d get the flu and be down for a week, I’d get the flu and cough so hard I’d break my own ribs and have to be hospitalized. I’ve been read last rites five times, you name it, I had it: bronchitis, scarlet fever, whooping cough, bird flu, anything you could think of. Even when I wasn’t sick I had rheumatoid arthritis, scoliosis- a whole laundry list of stuff. Every doctor I ever saw told me it would be a miracle if I lived past thirty. Bucky was my husband, sure, but he was also my full-time caretaker.”

“He didn’t volunteer for service because he needed to take care of you.”

Rogers nods. 

“We talked about it. The money was good, better than the mechanics job he was working, and he wanted to go. He was a capable Jewish man who wanted to fight back against the persecution of his people, and beyond that, he was just a good man who wanted to do what was right. I needed the help though. I had just as much chance of dying sitting around at home as he did in active combat. My ma was dead, Bucky’s folks didn’t talk to us, our friends were glad to help, sure, but they had their own lives; a lot of men were already enlisting, a lot of women were entering the workforce. He stayed until he couldn’t.”  

“And when he was drafted?”

“It was hard. It was hard for both of us. He wanted to fight, sure, but he was just as scared of dying as anybody, he threw up in the kitchen sink when he got his letter. He made sure everything was taken care of though, rounded up our friends who had extra time and made them promise to check in on me, took up a collection from all our neighbors so we could get a phone for the building, so I could call the hospital if things got really bad, stuff like that. He was always a planner, always ten steps ahead of everyone else, but it was still tough. We hadn’t spent a single night away from each other in five years, and all of a sudden we weren’t even in the same city. He went for basic training, but he was so good with a rifle they wanted to put him in sniper training too, which was another month. It was higher pay, a way off the front lines, a way for him to be proud of his work, but I know it bothered him that the reason he got promoted was because he was good at killing. He never told me but… I knew.”

“When did you start trying to enlist?”

Rogers snorts a laugh.

“Pretty much the second he shipped off for basic. I wanted to before that, but Bucky put his foot down, and I wasn’t gonna spend the little time we had left fighting with him.”

“Why did you keep trying to enlist?”

“A whole bushel of reasons. I wanted to serve my country, to feel useful, to have a job, to get out of my empty apartment… I always had a chance of dying, no matter what I was doing, so I might as well die for something right . I wasn’t naïve enough to think I was gonna be bunkmates with Bucky, but he was smart, had a good head on his shoulders, a good eye and steady hands. He was a shoo-in for promotion. I thought, best-case scenario, that he could be a captain or something, could maybe have some pull for where he was stationed, could be in the same country as me at the very least. And then, if I made it through, I could have something to be proud of, I could say that I had done something with my life. I never thought-”

He breaks off to huff a laugh, incredulity plain on his face.

“Somehow I never thought that Bucky would be the one who didn’t make it. He was like Superman to me, he seemed invincible. Even after I took the serum and got this new body, had all these crazy things happen to me… even after all of that, it was like he was the one who was larger than life.”

“How did he react to that? To you getting the serum?”

“Slowly,” Rogers says.

His eyes glaze over for a moment, but then he scrubs a hand over his face and continues. 

“When I first saw Bucky after the serum I was pulling him off of a table in Zola’s lab. I think he thought I was… some kind of hallucination at first. He just frowns at me and goes, ‘I thought you were smaller.’ He was….”

Rogers rolls his shoulders, as though to slough off bad memories.

“I don’t really want to go into it, but he was tortured, very badly, by Zola and his men. He wasn’t himself for a while. He told me later that he felt like he was in a dream for weeks after I pulled him off that table. ...and then one day it all just hits him like a brick. He-”

Rogers laughs, his smile lighting up his whole face. 

“He storms into a tent where I’m having a meeting with my superiors, and just goes, ‘That’s it, meeting over. I need to yell at Steve.’ And I mean, these are my superiors and I rank higher than he does, so they’re all gobsmacked at this 26-year-old kid from Brooklyn barging in and bossing them around. They just all sort of look at each other like ‘What the fuck?’ but Bucky just goes, ‘I’m gonna yell at him with or without you here, so you might as well leave.’ and they all pack up their stuff and go! Jesus, it was just about one of the funniest things I ever saw.”

“Did he yell at you?”

“ Absolutely . For like an hour straight. He was furious, just tearing into me, yelling about how I could have gotten killed, and what the hell was I thinking, and how stupid did I have to be, trying experimental procedures and storming enemy bases by myself, all kinds of stuff. And all the while I just kept smiling so big my face hurt, cause that was my Bucky. I was so worried, ‘cause he was just this… ghost after Zola, but there he was, madder than hell and all mine.”

“What happened after that? Did he get in trouble?”

“Are you kidding me? He yelled himself hoarse at Captain America and lived to tell the tale. It practically made him a celebrity. I had this reputation for being a loose cannon, probably well deserved, and Bucky had the reputation for being the only person I would actually listen to. Well, I mean, I would listen to everybody, ‘specially Peggy, but I wouldn’t always do what they wanted me to. Bucky though? He had such a tactical mind, better than anyone at strategizing. If Buck told me to do something I did it without question; he didn’t make bad calls. Whenever one of the Commandos really wanted something, they’d make sure Bucky was on board first, for anything from a break to a battle tactic. Not that I wasn’t listening to my team, but sometimes I’d… Well, let’s just say I get a little stubborn when I set my mind on something.”

“Did they know about you and Barnes?”

He wets his lips.

“Yeah, actually. Handled it better than I could have hoped.”

“How’d they find out? Did you tell them?”

Rogers laughs, incredulous. 

“Are you fucking kidding me? Tell a bunch of straight guys in the army that we were queers? Absolutely not. No, there had been… there had been a close call, a sniper. I had half of my ear shot off- it regenerated eventually-“ he shows me the ear, it looks totally fine, no missing parts at all, “and Bucky killed the shooter, but still, an inch over and I would have died. We were very careful in the army, even the best-case scenario would have been dishonorable discharge, but Jesus he was my husband and I almost died. I just wanted… I just wanted to kiss him.”

He sounds very small as he says the last sentence, as though remorseful, regretful, for what he had done. As if wanting to kiss his husband was wanting something wrong. 

“Anyway, we went a ways from the camp, but Dugan came looking for us. He caught us- in flagrante sounds more inappropriate than it was, it was only kissing, but still- and… nobody handled it very well. I’m not going to go into more details.”

He snaps the last bit as I open my mouth, and I click my jaw shut. 

“Sorry, I…” 

Running his hand through his hair, he lets out a sigh.

“I’m sorry. That was rude. You’re an interviewer, you’re doing your job. I just… I’m not going to go into it.”

“That’s fine,” I reassure, “Sure, I’m interviewing you, but this is about you. I don’t want you to talk about anything you’re not comfortable with.”

He smiles, surprised, as though he wasn’t expecting me to drop it. He’s done that a lot over the course of the day, act as though he isn’t expecting kindness. It’s strange, since he pours out so much kindness to everyone else. 

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

He takes another swig of his beer and a few deep breaths.

“A lot of shit went down that day, for a hell of a lot of reasons, but everyone agreed that it was best to keep the team together, and to keep me and Bucky’s relationship secret. It was… hard... at first. They had never really been around queer people before, and me and Buck were terrified that someone would change their mind, but it ended up working out. Gabe was the first one to really warm up to us. He was a poet, you know, a romantic at heart. I don’t think he could ever witness love without celebrating it, he was really amazing that way. After Gabe came Jacques, and the rest just snowballed from there. After a while, nobody cared. Sure, they’d kind of razz us about it sometimes, but they’d let us take watch together, wouldn’t give a shit if we held hands, stuff like that. The main problem was ignorance, I think. Once they understood us, understood that we were still the same people, it was fine. Everyone was really…”

He takes a deep breath.

“Really supportive of me when… um… when Bucky died. I don’t think I could have kept going without them. ...Well, them and Peggy.”

  “Would you mind talking about Peggy Carter?” I ask gingerly, “There seems to be a disconnect between what the history books say with what you’re saying now.”

“There’s a reason for that,” he answers matter of factly, “It was all fake.”

My eyebrows shoot so far up my forehead I’m amazed they don’t fly completely off my face. 

“Well, that was bad wording. I don’t want anyone to think anything she did in her career was fabricated, she really is that brilliant, that amazing. We did know each other too, were best friends even. She’s still my best friend. I talked to her before I asked you about this interview, actually. I didn’t want to say anything she wouldn’t want people to know.”

“So what was fake?”

“Just the romantic aspect. Bucky and I… I told you earlier that people have always clocked me for a queer. It slowed down a lot after I got this new body, but there were always rumors about me, especially about me and Bucky, even before the Commandos found out about us. I was a captain in the US Army, sure, but I was also a PR stunt; nothing would have been worse for the army’s image than to have Captain America be a fag. Peggy was in a similar boat. Sure, she was British, but she worked with a lot of Americans, was in charge of a lot of Americans, and people already had a hard time taking orders from a woman. Not to say that England didn’t have its problems, but still, America has always been a deeply racist country.”

“Racist? I’m not sure I follow.”

He sighs.

“Peggy had a relationship with a black officer.”

“ Oh. Oh, wow.”

“Yeah. It shouldn’t have been a problem. They were in different units, there was no power imbalance, they were sneaky about it and perfectly professional to one another, but it didn’t matter, rumors were started anyway. Peg and me were best friends, there were already rumors about us because the army has more gossip than a high school lunchroom, and so we fanned the flames. We both needed to protect our reputations, and it was better for both of us to date each other than the people we were actually with. She and the officer ended up breaking it off after six or seven months, amicably I may add, but we had a good thing going. Sure, she didn’t like being pigeonholed as ‘Captain America’s girlfriend’- I didn’t like that either, I think she’s one of the smartest people on the planet- but overall it worked out. Like I said, we were best friends.”  

“How did Carter and Barnes get along?”

He snorts.

“Like a damn house on fire. After Bucky did all that shouting at me Peggy wanted to meet him. I was so nervous about them liking each other I almost said no.”

He laughs, looking painfully young.

“Buck didn’t want me there, for whatever reason, so I gave them a couple'a hours to talk in my tent. When I came back they were both in the middle of a game of strip-poker, completely soused and smoking cigars.”

A laugh startles out of me.

“Well, that’s an image!”

“A damn good one,” he agrees with a wink.

“Who was winning?”

“Me!” he confides with a roguish grin, “They both had their tops off.”

We laugh conspiratorially together before Rogers sighs.

“I don’t know how on earth she got Bucky to tell her that night, but she knew about us, never treated us any different for it. She’s a godsend, really. When they took me out of the ice I…” 

He cuts off and looks away from me, clearly ashamed.

“I think I would have killed myself if she hadn’t been alive.” 

The silence sits heavy in the room for a moment, tangible and large as an elephant. I look at the ramekin ashtray from so many hours ago and wonder how that could only be from this morning, when he blocked out the sun, more myth than man. I look at the magazine and see a 98-pound girl who was only a girl sometimes, and layer it over the image of Captain America in my mind. I think about how to comfort an American hero, and then I think about how to comfort a queer kid who’s just come out of the closet, and then I think about how the answer might be one and the same.

“Come here, honey,” I tell him, holding out my arms, “come here.”

He collapses into my arms, burying his face into my shoulder as I pet his hair. It’s strange, how small he seems for someone so large, how vulnerable. I think about how brave he is for this, for everything he’s done today. I think back to when I first knew I was a lesbian, how I was so scared to tell my mom I burst into tears before I could even get a word out. He may no longer have a mom to tell, but he has the whole world. A whole world with expectations and assumptions, who threaten to call up Captain America to punch people who say ‘Happy Holidays’, who hide pictures of their girlfriend because they think he’ll call them slurs, who come up to him on the street and say their favorite Avenger is Thor, who can pay their rent this month because he left a forty dollar tip.

I think about Peggy Carter, ninety years old, seeing her best friend for the first time in sixty years. I think about Bucky Barnes, lost in the snow, with a candle lit every year on the anniversary of his death. I think about Steve Rogers, walking into a game of strip poker. I think about Steve Rogers, waking up in the future all alone. I think about Steve Rogers, crying in my arms.

I cry too. 

We both cry, and I think, maybe this is it. Maybe this is America. Just a couple of queer kids crying on a couch. 

The sun starts to hang low in the sky.

Eventually, we pull back, with tear tracks on our faces and lighter hearts, and a key fits into the front door’s lock. 

Maybe I’m biased, but in the fading light of the sunset, my girlfriend looks like an angel framed in the doorway, all dark skin and orange sundress, a baguette poking out of her reusable grocery bag. She catches my eye, and when I give a nod she smiles at Rogers, soft but bright.

“Hey Captain Rogers, would you like to stay for dinner? I think we can convince her to keep it off the record.”

She gives a wink and he laughs.

“I don’t know,” he responds playfully, gesturing to his red-rimmed eyes, “She’s really putting me through the wringer.”

I knock my knee against his. 

“Stay for dinner. I think we got some cokes in the fridge, the kind with the glass bottles. Besides, she had a Bucky Bear as a kid, I’m sure she’d love to hear about your husband.”

The words are a gamble, but they pay off when Rogers beams, big and bright.

The rest, dear readers, is off the record.  

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EDITOR’S NOTE 03/13/2014: Captain Rogers and his companions Natasha Romonov and Sam Wilson are currently considered fugitives by S.H.I.E.L.D. and are a threat to national security. If you or someone you know has knowledge of Steve Rogers’ whereabouts, please call the S.H.I.E.L.D tipline or contact your local law enforcement.