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Natasha finds Steve sitting alone in the dark. There’s a small reading light on, casting soft shadows over the room, but it’s not enough light for her to tell more than the fact that he’s holding a book and crying.
“Steve?” she asks softly, not wanting to intrude but not wanting to leave him. She’s not good at offering comfort but nor is she someone who can leave a comrade to suffer alone either. Not anymore.
He startles, apparently not having heard her enter, and turn to look at her, tears making his cheeks glisten in the low light.
He doesn’t shout, or try and hide, or tell her to leave, so she moves a few steps closer. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” he says, rubbing the back of his hand across his face to catch the tears, an almost childlike gesture. “Didn’t hear you come in.”
“Wouldn’t be much of a spy if people heard me coming,” she says and he smiles like she’d wanted him too but he doesn’t look any less anguished. “What are you reading?”
He holds up the book. The title is simply ‘the Holocaust’. “Oh, Steve…”
“We failed,” he says, looking her in the eye for the first time since she entered the room. “I knew the rough outline but it’s only just sinking in. All that time I was running around chasing Hydra… We failed. I failed. All my friends, all my comrades dead, and I thought nothing would hurt like losing Bucky, but then I find out that 17 million people, 17 million civilians, were killed and I did nothing.”
“What could you have done?*
“I don’t know, but something! I had power; my image had power. Maybe instead of parading ‘round doing stupid fucking dance routines night after night, I could have been trying to talk about this stuff or… I don’t know, Tash. I don’t know what I could have done that would have changed anything. But we knew about that. That’s the awful thing. We knew. Not the scale, maybe, and the news we got was always more about the Christians being rounded up than the Jews or the Queers or the Gypsies but even so. We knew it was happening and yet liberating the camps somehow wasn’t top priority. Taking in refugees wasn’t top priority. Fucking hell Tasha, when Erskine asked me why I wanted to join the war, you know what I said?”
She does. Of course she does. There’s been a dozen movies and endless documentaries and she hasn’t seen all of them but she’s seen enough. Some of them had even formed part of her education on Capitalist culture, back in the Red Room. “I don’t like bullies.”
“Yeah. And I meant it. I meant exactly that. Not ‘Jewish people have a right to live’. Not ‘Gypsies and cripples and Jehova’s Witnesses and whoever else deserve to live’. Maybe if I’d known that queers were being rounded up like the rest, that people like me were being targeted, maybe then I’d have said something different. But I only knew about people who weren’t like me, so instead of saying ‘I want to stop the most terrible thing that has ever happened on this earth’ I said ‘I don’t like bullies’. I thought… shit, I knew people were dying but somehow I still thought that what was wrong was that Hilter was pushing people around. I thought if someone went and gave him a punch in a jaw that the world would go back to being normal, like before.”
“But it was never normal.” She’d had this realisation herself. Not triggered by learning about the Holocaust, or Stalin’s Great Purge, or the Cambodian Genocide, or any of the other unimaginable horrors that have happened in her long lifetime. It hadn’t been the statistics, or the numbers, or even the lists of the dead. For her, it had been a song. She’d heard ‘Strange Fruit’, heard the terrible pain in Billie Holliday’s voice as she sang about the country Natasha had thought represented freedom, and she’d seen how rotten it all was. It had taken Clint to show her that that was no excuse to stop fighting, that even if all they could do was fight small fires and never address the ever-burning tar-pit that was the source of them, it was still worthwhile.
She doesn’t know if she can do that for Steve.
“No,” Steve says. “It never was. I was twenty-three, and queer, and had so many things wrong with me it was a wonder I was still standing, and my best friend in the whole world was getting shipped off to die in a foreign country, and I was still somehow stupid enough think that the world was basically okay, that my fellow Americans were basically okay, that once the war was over things would go back to some idealised version of normal where there was no persecution and no government-sponsored oppression.”
He sets the book gingerly on the floor, careful with it even though she can see he wants to break something. “You know what I read about last week? The Civil Rights movement. Week before that, CIA involvement in South America. Sexism, gay cures, the internment camps for Japanese people. And most of it was going on right then, right under my goddamn nose, and I thought that everything would get magically fixed if someone just punched Hitler!”
“You couldn’t have known, Steve. No way you could have known.”
“There was a fascist rally three streets from my house,” he says flatly. “Three, four months before America joined the war. I didn’t like it but I thought it was just a lot of hot air. I had neighbours who used to listen to Father Coughlin on the radio talking about how Jews were taking over the country every week.”
“You inspired people.”
“I was a blond haired blue eyed Christian who was too damn scared to tell anyone he was queer, standing up on a stage and reading a script about how I was better than everyone else. Even once I started actually doing something the people I saved were soldiers not persecuted civilians. What was I supposed to be inspiring them to do, exactly? Because Bruce suggested I read up on McCarthyism and I gotta say, it doesn’t look like I inspired anyone to be a better person.”
He’s right. She’s dealt with one or two Neo-Nazi organisations over the years. Usually lethally, though she’s traded with them for information as well. Clint had been horrified by that but Clint’s softer and younger than she’ll ever be. Posters of Steve Rogers, usually out of uniform but not always, have featured more prominently in their propaganda than she will ever admit to him. Apart from being kind, fair-minded to a fault and bi, he’s everything the Reich wanted to create.
She’d been on a propaganda poster once. Standing next to Alexi in his dress uniform, in an outfit perfectly chosen to be flattering without being decadent, she’d been a perfect image of patriotic Soviet womanhood. She’d hated the poster, even before she broke free of the Red Room.
“Do you know what I was doing during the war?” she asks.
He startles. “You weren’t born.”
“Bruce wasn’t the only one who tried to recreate Erskine’s serum, Steve. I was born in November 1927 in Stalingrad. Or in September in Moscow. Or in February '28 in the Steppe. I’ve never found anyone who could give me an accurate answer.
“I do know I was a teenager in 1941. I spent most of the year training to be a perfect assassin, just like every other year that I could remember. But in December, I was sent to Madripoor. It was my first real mission in the field. I was excited. I'd never been outside of Russia before. When my handlers asked me how I felt about the mission, I told them I hoped it would be sunny.
“My mission was to kill the leader of the Hand. Not because he was a murderer. Not because he was negotiating an alliance with Von Struker. Because a very old, very evil, very rich man had paid my handlers a great deal of money.
“I knew what was going on in Europe. It was considered important that we were kept abreast of political developments. I had even been taught that the tenets of Nazism were evil, since the Soviets were at war with them by then. And I had more than one opportunity to kill Von Struker during my time in Madripoor. I didn’t do it.”
“You were a child!”
“I was a politically aware teenager with no compunctions about taking human life. I had been trained for it my whole life. I didn't need to speak to you for more than a few minutes to know that you were far more a child at twenty-three than I was at fourteen. And yet I did nothing. Does that make me a monster?”
“I know what you’re trying to do, Tasha, and it won’t work. You can’t change the facts.”
“No. I can't. You knew, and you did nothing. You were shown the facts and did not see because you did not wish to look. These things are true.”
“Yes.”
“You spent your war hunting down Hydra agents because it was personal, without thinking about what actually needed doing.”
“Goddamnit Natasha, I know! I know, okay! I failed, Captain America failed. 17 million preventable deaths and the world didn’t even learn from it. I turn on the news, and there are these people shouting hatred, and I’ve heard it all before. I fought so hard to save my fellow soldiers, and I find out half of them came home to raise kids who believed all the same things as the people we were fighting. We lost!”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“No, we didn’t lose. You and I, we both failed. We failed personally. And after the war… You weren’t there for that bit but I’ll save you the trouble of the research. It was a shit show. The Europeans were shell-shocked, the Jews were homeless, the Middle East was destabilising, Russia was expanding, and the Americans were busy inventing Jello Salad. A lot that should have been done wasn’t. A lot of lessons that should have been learned weren’t. But we didn’t lose.
“17 million deaths is loss on an unimaginable scale. But it could have been more. It would have been more. It would have gone on and on until nothing was left. But we stopped it. Not you and me personally but we played our part. We did something. And the men you saved did something.”
She wishes she had a cigarette and then remembers that smoking hasn’t been part of her cover since the 60s. She’d always appreciated the fact that it had given her something to do with her hands.
“There isn’t an easy answer,” she says eventually. “If the Cold War taught me one thing, it’s that. We want things to be simple, we want them to end, but they don’t. The war is won but that’s not the end, that’s barely even the end of a chapter, because now you have starving people and refugees and the world is fundamentally changed but the people in charge are still the same and… And it’s like us. We live with tragedy, and loss, and horror, and we go on. We stumble on in the dark, hurting people without meaning too, always out of step with the world around us, but maybe we save a few people too. Maybe we love some people, help some people. Maybe, in some small way, we make the world better.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I believe it’s better than sitting alone in the dark weeping for your own guilt,” she says, more sharply than she means to. She’s had this conversation in her own head so many times that she forgets Steve needs a gentler hand than her. “I believe trying is better than giving up, always.”
“And if nothing changes?”
Natasha laughs, genuine in a way she only seems capable of when the joke is cruel. “I’ve been doing this longer than you, soldier boy. The world revolves and nothing changes. You fight bad guys in capes who shout about their plans and while you’re distracted, the bad guys in smart suits who lie about their intentions make the world worse in a thousand little ways. That doesn’t mean punching the bad guys in capes isn’t necessary.”
“You’re kind of terrible at being comforting, you know that?”
She looks away, looks down at fingers not clutching a cigarette because they’re in a new century and things change even as they stay the same. “I’m older than you, Steve. If the old are comforting, it’s because we’re lying to make you feel better.”
“So everything is hopeless, and we’re all doomed, and we should still get up and fight anyway because it’s better than doing nothing?”
“We might never have got rid of fascism, but the fact that that book even exists, the fact that we’re having this conversation, suggests something was achieved. You believe in God?”
“I did. I’m not so sure now.”
“I’ve known some holy men and women in my life and in the end what all of them said, in one way or another, was keep fighting. Fight for the sake of fighting. Fight like your soul depends on it because it does. Fight evil in whatever form you find it and when you get to heaven, you march right up to God, and you fight Him too for creating a world where fighting is necessary.”
Steve raises an eyebrow, and she chuckles. “It was a Rabbi who told me that last bit,” she admits. “Christians are too inclined to take God’s will lying down.”
Steve reaches out to her and she allows him to catch her fingers between his own. “Thanks, Tasha.”
“Did I help?”
“Not really but I appreciate that you tried.”
She pats the back of his hand. “Anytime kid.”