My heart breaks for Steve so much. I just want him to rest and be happy. Hopefully he'll get that soon. Thanks for writing this!

Aaaagh. Your writing. It's so beautiful.
"There was a time when he could not have Peggy, or Bucky, or anything he knew or loved, but he saved the world."
"Maybe it is selfish to pray that his end is one of sacrifice, when sacrifice has never done much to persuade the world. (Only to save it.)"
All these little introspective Cap pieces hit me right in the feels. Keep up the good work.

Well, carve my heart out and grill it up. Sheesh!

That HURT. ME. Once again, you are so incredibly good at capturing the essence of these characters in so few words, and that talent (as I've said a million times before) is incredible. The bit at Peggy's graveside in particular absolutely KILLED me; so sad and nostalgic and wonderful. Great work.

Good lord this was wonderful. Poetry once again, as is your way. I love your stories about Captain America because they're such 'big' movies with so many cast members (especially the later movies including all those Avengers) that it can sometimes be difficult to really delve into the characters throughout the film. It's about the action and the fighting and the drama. But you capture something really deep here. You show us who Steve in the moments between those epic battles he seems to keep finding. You show us his thought process, his need to run headlong into those conflicts, the pain that would come with not doing that, with doing nothing. I loved the line you chose to use in the description, and I loved this whole section too:

"Theirs is not the sort of story where people want to see tragedy. Even now, even in the twenty-first century, people like the Captain America who punches Nazis in whatever new form they may take.
It's so much simpler, when the blood stays behind museum glass.
It's so much simpler, when the war stays in photographs."

I love (and also hate lol) this idea that even all these years later, Steve has to maintain the simplicity of the hero he has been for decades. No one wants to hear the tragic backstory or the cold he feels inside his skin- they just want their hero, immovable and invincible, same as always. Again, just perfectly worded and conveyed. Awesome.

(This is Mythopoeia not logged in hiii)

THIS HURTS.

'Happiness is never all at once. There was a time when he had his parents, but that was before he could serve; there was a time when he could not serve, but he had Peggy; there was a time when he could not have Peggy, or Bucky, or anything he knew or loved, but he saved the world.'

'Steve lives in the present, and it takes so much time' AUGHHH

Okay, so any time anything is written about Steve via his relation to time, I get excited. But when you do it? It is basically the greatest thing. I really, really loved the above-quoted passages. You are one of the few writers who can actually make me stop, stunned, take a breath, and have a wholly new way of looking at Steve. This fic and the way you explain his central tragedy by how it's not he's never had good times-he's just never had a perfect time, a time where everything that is important and central to who he is as a person-is just brilliant. And so sad, too, because he will never get that, either-Bucky will never be who he was before Winter Soldier (or the War, for that matter), Peggy is not coming back, but then even if he did have a time machine, Tony wouldn't be there and Natasha wouldn't be around to rib him, and I've got shades of Samwise at the end of LotR going on here, too-he cannot always be torn in two. Except, of course, Steve's tragedy is that that's exactly what he has to be. Anyway, I love this. Never stop breaking my heart about Steve Rogers, please.