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bedlamsbard · 5 months

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I rotate my hyperfixations like seasons and it's Steve Time so is there a thing in home that you expected more ppl to notice and have been waiting to talk about?

Nobody in the SSR believes Steve.

It's not that most people still believe he's lying to them, either maliciously or because he was brainwashed, but the frozen in ice/time travel story is so wild that no one can actually get their heads around it. Even Howard doesn't believe him subconsciously, back in his lizard hindbrain and his gut, as much as he believes him otherwise.

Everyone knows that something really awful happened to Steve, but the thing is -- it's the worst war in human history, all of the Howling Commandos were POWs in a Hydra slave labor camp, there are atrocities being committed on a daily basis, the SSR and the 107th have been on the front lines of the Western Front of the European theatre for years now and the Howlies often operated behind enemy lines. "Something really awful" is not exactly exceptional in any way, and from their perspective Steve was only missing for a month. He's different from how he was the last time they saw him, but not in any way that can only be explained away by "he was frozen in ice for sixty-seen years and then got slapped back in time by an alien." Subconsciously it's very explicable with "his best friend died in front of him, less than a week later he deliberately crashed a plane laden with bombs while thinking he was going to die, and then he made his way back to Allied territory through occupied Europe. met a girl along the way and married her on pretty short notice."

And the thing is...that happened all the time in WWII. Literally all the time! All parts of it! There's nothing weird about it; everyone in the SSR probably knows a couple of people who experienced most or all of that, if not experienced parts of it themselves, and consciously or subconsciously making that assumption about Captain America is extremely believable and even relatable. There's a reason it's the cover story for Steve's return.

The problem is, of course, that that's not what actually happened to Steve.

Back up in the twenty-first century, no one who's actually met Steve thinks he's lying about what happened to him (though it's a feature in various conspiracy theories), but that's because by 2012 everyone had had sixty-seven years to get used to the idea of Tragically Lost Captain America. Especially back in 2012, you met Steve and you knew that something was just ever so slightly off about him, because he just didn't have the body language or other cues that someone born in 1984 rather than 1918 would have. (In MCU canon Steve and Natasha are the same age with a five month difference once you subtract the icebox years, if you go with a 2012 defrosting date.) In 1945 he has 2018 body language, mostly, but otherwise he hasn't visibly changed. He doesn't look six years older and the body language and other cues can be explained away with "his best friend died, he crash-landed an airplane, and he had to make his way back through occupied territory." Because, again, this happened all the time.

It's a point of extreme stress for Steve that no one in the SSR -- including Peggy, the Howlies, Howard, and Phillips -- believes him. Steve is not the kind of person people often disbelieve, and he's really not used to being disbelieved by these specific people. Going into the ice and waking up sixty-seven years later is the single defining experience of Steve's life, and having most of the people he loves more than anything else in the world not believe him is absolutely awful for him. It's almost worse that they're not doubting him openly anymore, but he can tell that they don't really believe him. As he tells Natasha in Chapter 7, "You can know something and not believe it." The people in the SSR who are in on the secret might know it -- but not one of them really, down in their guts, believes it.

(Peggy actually does think he's lying, but she can't figure out about what or if it's malicious or brainwashing. That's also extremely stressful for Steve, because it's Peggy. And the thing is -- he is lying! There are actually a host of things he's either lying about or concealing and two of them are very, very personal both to him and to the SSR. So that doesn't help either.)

#sorry for the delayed response! I had a rough couple of days #snowberriesromanoff #bedlam replies #iw time travel concept #home behind the scenes

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