Fic: Hearken to the Sleeping King by adn_heming, Patriot, Falcon / Captain America
Title: Hearken to the Sleeping King
Author: adn_heming
Fandom: 616
Prompt: | Falcon (Sam Wilson), Patriot (Eli Bradley) | Gen | Conversation (s) about Steve and other matters
Rating: Gen
Word Count: 4,000
Disclaimer: The characters and settings featured in this story are the property of Marvel Entertainment. This is a work of homage and no copyright infringement is intended.
Author’s notes: This fic owes a lot to the mad betaing skills of lilacsigil, xenokattz and caia_comica. They answered far and beyond the calls of duty and without them, the story would not have evolved to what it is now. Thank you guys!
All remaining mistakes and typos are my own
x-posted to marveloustales
Sam Wilson is not unfamiliar with loss.
Years ago, when Sam was twelve and Sara not much older, their father had been murdered in the streets of Harlem by the wayward son of a member of his own congregation. Hannah Johnson, who’d tried so hard to keep her son on the straight and narrow, hugged Darlene Wilson at the funeral and wept while Sam and Sara glared at her from their mother’s side. As if in retaliation for their lack of generosity, Darlene was killed a few years later.
Death haunts the people that Sam loves. Every now and then, she reminds him of her due with the soft beat of her wings: A bullet wound, a hospital bed, a night’s vigil, every now and then, a coffin.
Sam couldn’t stand guns. He never could.
And he should have known better.
Steve, beloved as he was, the hero of World War II and ― let’s face it, their blond-haired and blue eyed boy - had never been immune. Not in their line of work. Not with villains and monsters howling to bring down the man they saw as America’s herald. Not amid a corrupt government and a public so fickle that they’d agree to hunting down and arresting Captain America, because he’d refused to follow an unjust law. Steve wasn’t immune then, and he certainly wasn’t immune now, in the midst of a superhero civil war.
It was the way of the world they lived in, Sam thought, bitter, and not quite resigned when the doctor emerged from the operating room in defeat. The world just had it in for the people Sam loved. That was it.
#
After the wake, Luke Cage and the others kicked them out of the Avengers. For the typical, heroic reasons. Lay down your arms, go back to school, then maybe, when you’re old enough to make decisions of that magnitude and decide this is what you want to do, come back. If this is what you want.
“There’s no telling what the others will do now,” they said. Cap had kept Stark in check ― and now that check was gone. He wouldn’t have wanted them mixed up in what Stark and his goons might do.
Bullshit, Eli had said. That might have been true, to an extent, but Cap would also have wanted them to do what was right. Eli chose to honour the latter. He'd grabbed what remained of his group and kept on fighting. If Stark wanted them to stop, he’d have to arrest them.
But after a few run-ins, a few televised skirmishes between Avengers and Avengers Corporate, Eli realized what got the others so spooked. Stark was fighting dirtier, pulling tooth and nail to bring any remaining anti-regs into the fold. Never mind supervillains, madmen, falling debris from buildings and actual civilians in peril.
What the hell? Even after Cap?
“He has justify losing Cap,” Kate said. They’re in the old Avengers mansion in one of their days together, and she’s lying stomach down on the floor. He stares and she shrugs her shoulders, weary with knowledge. “If the world isn’t exactly the way he needs it to be, after all that, he’d have lost Cap for nothing.”
“That’s messed up, Kate.”
“Hey, never said he was otherwise. And we all deal the way we deal.”
Yet the stormtroopers never came goose-stepping up to their homes, their schools. In part that was Billy’s doing: an incantation that placed a mental disconnect between their superhero and private identities. It was placed there at Steve’s and Faith’s insistence: a cover that lets them go about their daily lives until they need to break it to save the world. But surely, a niggling voice at the back of Eli’s mind said, Stark’s got better, more experienced mystics at his disposal? He could use them to break it at any time.
Eli doesn’t dwell on Stark much. He can deal by playing Caesar. Eli’s dealing by fighting on.
He’s Patriot. He’s a Young Avenger, Faith and Isaiah Bradley’s grandson and fighting on in spite of an unjust law. No one’s taking that, anymore than they could have taken from Cap what he was.
Who loved him, and what he had stood for.
#
Sam turned himself in to sign. He would be registered: all nice and legal.
He knew what Steve would say to that, but he’d be damned if he’d leave Steve alone to the wolves. Their old friends wouldn’t just bury him: they’d use Steve as an emblem for their brave new world and never mind what the man had believed. So Sam swallowed the bitterness that welled up in him and went to make a deal with the devil.
Stark had looked like hell. Nightmares had drawn shadows under his eyes. He had everything he’d fought for, and he was broken in his victory.
“I’m signing your damn Act,” Sam snarled. Redwing hissed in psychic sympathy, primed for a fight against enemies to the nest. Steve’s absence left Sam raw and ragged: he was in no mood to be generous. “Most of us are. You got what you wanted Stark, so fucking live with it.”
“I fought for what was necessary Sam,” Stark corrected. “Do you think I wanted this?”
“You sure as hell did everything you could to bring it about.”
“I didn’t want this. I did everything humanely possible to prevent it.”
“Asking him to betray his friends? Hounding him down when he said no? Parading him for a mob? That was all for Steve?”
Stark opened his palm, Caesar bequeathing gifts. “What do you want Sam? It’s yours.”
They both left that battleground scarred and bleeding, Sam with promises that could easily be broken and Stark with the shattered remnants of his victory. Assuage it with all the compromises you want, Sam thought bitterly, Steve would still be dead.
He returned to the Avengers ― the real Avengers, in Sam’s mind ― to celebrate Steve’s memory. He would have to leave their friends for good, if he didn’t want to do them any harm.
That thought cast a gloom over everyone’s mind: not whether Sam would betray them, but how he would fare cut off from his comrades-in-arms, alone in a world where his friend was dead and Stark was King.
“Take care, Sam,” Hawkeye said, standing on tiptoe to give him a hug.
“Yeah,” Patriot said. “We’ve got your back, when you need it.”
Sam cut him short. “Kid, that’s a bad idea.”
“We’re not ki―”
“Yeah you are.” Sam shot back. He didn’t care if he insulted their pride, if he got them to listen. “Stark and I may have got an understanding but there are no guarantees. He decides to come after you? He knows you and me are friendly. That’s it. You’re all done.”
“You guys can’t make us stop being who we are,” said Eli. The kid had Steve’s clear-eyed look, the utter conviction, too missed and too familiar.
The hook in Sam’s heart twists, just a little. “Maybe not,” Sam said quietly, “But none of you are getting killed or dragged through the mud on our watch.” He turned to go, to leave his friends and comrades-in-arms for good.
#
When S.H.I.E.L.D. had first went after the kids, Steve freaked. Quietly, and not in the way of panicky parents whose kids were out in the dark, but in hushed, drawn-out anger and disbelief, as he and Sam lay awake in their bunk.
“Isaiah Bradley’s grandson,” Steve said. He hadn’t said anything when they first took the kids out of the power-dampeners, but Sam knew, the minute Steve had laid his eyes on Patriot and the other Young Avengers. The condition they had been left in, when the cape-killers were done. “Do you know what would happen if the government got their hands on him, legally?”
And the thought of that chilled Sam, tucked up against Steve’s back. He knew of Isaiah, of Josiah X and the lengths to which the government had gone to create them, and then to cover it up. There was no doubt they could make a teenage boy disappear, if that’s what they wanted.
And he knew Steve knew that too. Sam watched him lying awake in the dark, eyes fixed on some inscrutable point, haunted by the ghosts of the dead who were wronged, and Isaiah as he might have been. Sam reached out to shake his shoulder and shake him firmly back into the present. But the ghosts were stubborn: they stayed and multiplied.
“Wanda’s children,” Steve whispered. “Scott’s daughter. My God, what does Tony think he’s doing?”
“Shhh,” Sam had whispered. “It’s okay. The kids are okay. Thanks to you.”
“Today they are,” Steve had said, and turned, settling his head against Sam’s shoulder.
#
The first time Elijah Bradley talked to the Falcon, really talked in the way of padawans and jedi knights he had been too furious to think straight.
It was a lot of things. Bill Foster had just died; Billy was gone; Ty and Tandy and Cassie too, in the way that hurt the most. But then he’d had the idiocy to turn on the news.
It was nothing new. Nothing but a variation on what people had said about him before, when Patriot and the Young Avengers were new and later when they had become the Avengers’ protégés. No different from what people said when Cap turned, and never mind that S.H.I.E.L.D. came after Luke Cage and his family in their own home. But Elijah felt like he’d been forced to swallow one bitter pill too many and stalked off to clear his head, hunched in civilian clothes. All their beliefs, their lived reasons for fighting the law was erased, invalidated, by the assumption that the anti-regs were nothing more than Cap’s starry-eyed followers, and never mind that most of them had rebelled long before Cap went rogue.
“That’s what happens when you’re associated with the man,” the Falcon said when he caught up with him. He was in civvies then, a black jacket and plain blue jeans. He cocked his head at Eli. “Everything you do and everything you are becomes all about him, even if that’s not true.”
“What man, now you’re a telepath with people too?” Elijah couldn’t help himself but the Falcon didn’t seem to take offence.
“Son, I ain’t blind or deaf,” The Falcon said. “And I know a bit of what that’s like.”
“Look, I respect the guy,” love him, Eli would have said, if love had been in his vocabulary for those outside his immediate family. But even after he and Cap had made peace, their mentorship was still fraught with the living ghost of Isaiah Bradley and the ghosts of the men who hadn’t made it. Not his fault, and not his crime, but they lingered.
And he would never tell Sam Wilson, hero, Steve Roger’s best friend that it galled Eli that what he did and what he believed was put all on Cap. Never mind the sad-eyed man at home, the steel-eyed woman who had fought red tape and evil men to free him and raise and protect their family.
“Yeah kid, I know,” Sam Wilson said, softly, and for a moment, Elijah is freaked and wonders if Sam Wilson’s telepathy extends just a little bit beyond birds. “But it sucks all the same. Sucks for him too. People see a symbol that’s failed them instead of a man with something to say. All our politics are being swept aside because it suits them.”
“‘Cause they don’t want to think about Luke Cage and his family getting the knock on the door,” Eli spat. “Or the lady who runs one of our safehouses whose granddaughter can fly, but doesn’t want to be a superhero. Or what they did to Tommy before we got him out. If I didn’t have to keep quiet about what happened to Grandpa and Uncle Josiah I’d ― ”
Throw what happened to his grandfather and uncle in the face of the American people and in Stark’s. Ask them if a government capable of that, of having the gall to demand the Bradleys’ continued silence, should be trusted with the kind of power they demanded. But he did have to keep quiet: a sacred mantra had been drummed into him by his Grandma Faith and by his Mom. It was the price they paid for keeping Isaiah and Josiah safe. Elijah balled his fists into the pockets of his jackets. Anger was such a useless thing, these days.
Stark and the people on his side didn’t get it. Or maybe they did and didn’t care. His beliefs were far from a starry-eyed mistake undertaken on Captain America’s behalf, but they used the glamour of the man to sweep them all aside.
“Easy man,” Sam Wilson said and reached out to grasp his shoulder.
“Look man, I know, but folks will think what they want,” Sam said. “You know you didn’t put that uniform on for him; and you know you’re not fighting this war for him either: it’s the opposite. He’s fighting it with us. You know it. Cap knows it. That’s all that matters.”
Eli snorted. “And to hell with what everyone else believes.”
“Yes,” Sam said.
“You guys all sound like Grandma Faith.”
“Wise woman,” Sam said. “Listen man, we gotta go. There are cape-killers around, and Steve and me, we swore we’d get you back to her and your Grandpa in one piece.”
#
Sometimes when he woke up, Sam could feel Steve. The breath of Steve’s rueful laughter at the back his neck, felt Steve’s eyes on him as he woke with a start and turned over to find nothing but an absence. He would walk into his flat, turn on the light and think for an instant that he saw a familiar silhouette asleep on the couch.
Sam got by. There were folks who needed his help.
There were the folks of Harlem: kids in danger of ending up on the wrong side of the law, families barely holding together, people who needed to run from the monsters that lurked there. And there were new people who come to Sam’s office for advice: people who had gotten into accidents that should have killed them but gave them the gift of flight, telekinesis, or what-have-you. Sam gave them their legal options and sent the more desperate ones to the underground.
He kept track of the kids ― Steve’s kids, as Sam thought of them, even though he knew they would object and Steve would definitely raise an eyebrow. But Steve had trained them, taught them to move and think as part of a team, as comrades-in-arms.
And considering what they’re still getting up to, in spite of everything, there’s no doubt that they share his convictions.
Sam slumped his shoulder at every headline, every Frontline column that blasts the Young Avengers for being dangerous and reckless, blindly devoted to Steve Rogers’ cause even after the man had surrendered and admitted he was wrong. But the corners of his lips couldn’t help tugging in a smile.
“The things you left behind, man,” he said aloud, to Steve’s ghost.
Sam doesn’t think Stark and his cape-killers will go after the kids - the Young Avengers are all that’s left of a better time and hard as it is Sam to admit or understand, given the things Stark’s done, Steve still means something to the man. But Stark might surprise him in the worst way possible, so he keeps tabs in any way he can, as much he can.
Lucky New York City is full of birds and no one thinks anything of birds in school yards.
#
Oh man who do you think you’re kidding? Elijah thought, looking up at a familiar silhouette in the sky. Not a peregrine: Elijah’s no expert with birds, but he knows enough to recognize Redwing. What the hell, Falc.
It’s a darker world now: that much is undeniable. People went missing from Eli’s school, and the grapevine says that they had to register, and that they were now in the Initiative.
It chilled Eli, who didn’t know if this was simply part of the world they now lived in, or a subtle language of a threat.
Eli often wondered how the others are ― Sam and the Secret Avengers. They still refused to make contact with the Young Avengers, and that probably wouldn’t change in the near future unless his own team forced the issue.
Too dangerous and too big, Bucky had told him, that day in Cap’s loft. What he and Sam were doing, what the Avengers were untangling wasn’t for the Young Avengers, and least of all, for the kid everyone thought of as Captain America’s protégé, dressed in his colours.
Never mind that Eli had fought a war with him, too. That fact didn’t seem to register with anyone, and so once again, Eli was left alone with Steve Rogers’ ghost.
He was a gentle, melancholy thing that sits between Eli and his grandfather as they play a game of checkers or cards, hand tucked under his chin as he watches their moves. He was there in the room with Isaiah as he watches old children’s cartoons, his own eyes sadder than ever. Elijah isn’t sure these days what his grandfather understood and didn’t, but he was pretty sure he knew Steve was gone. Isaiah grew listless towards the end of the week, watching the windows for a familiar blonde-haired figure, tracked the room for someone who should be there to play cards with and talk about the war.
Steve loomed large when the Bradley family could stand to turn on the news.
There was a slight shift in the rhetoric now. People were angry, now that he was gone, sure he’d been silenced. Suddenly, what they believed ― what Steve had argued and fought for ― was no longer selfish or short-sighted or treason. Now that he was dead it was safe to wonder whether he had been right.
Sometimes that’s what it takes, the ghost of Steve said, stretched out on the chair in Eli’s room, relaxed as a cat. At least they’re talking now, and maybe that will lead to something.
Maybe.
Eli remembers when they scouted buildings together during the war, when they talked politics and of Eli’s family back home ― and the anger and grief just *hits* him.
“I don’t know man,” he said aloud in his room to the empty air. “Seems unfair to me. Someone up there has a lousy sense of humour.” Cap’s life for a maybe. What a sucky deal.
Steve’s ghost smiled at Eli, sad and rueful.
We move on from here, he told him. What else can we do?
Move on.
#
Eli can’t let this go. There has to be something.
#
“Chick,” Redwing said, out of the blue.
Steve would crack up, Sam thought. As it was, he gave Morgan James, six years old, a gentle smile and a teddy bear from the toy box collection as he handed her to child services. Mom missing, a three year old brother, and she didn’t know who else to call. She’d found Sam’s number in her Mom’s coat pocket and rang.
“Chick!” Redwing insisted. Sam can feel the insistent beat of his wings.
Sam received a mental image in his mind’s eye: a handsome boy in a blue hooded jacket, hands tucked in his pockets, looking up at the sky. At him. At the falcon overhead.
“Man,” Sam Wilson told his bird: “Patriot’s gonna be pissed when he finds out you called him that.”
#
“What the hell are you doing, man?”
“Can I come in?” Eli asked, as if there wasn’t the threat of Avengers Corporate and Stark at their backs. Sam Wilson glowered.
“Yeah, you’d better,” he said and lets the boy named Patriot inside.
Steve’s ghost lingered inside the flat, as he does everywhere else. There’s a photo of him and Sam in civilian clothing at the bookshelf, beside a weathered, battered copy of Mark Twain.
“Elijah, what is this about?” Sam asked, rubbing the back of his head. He hands him a Coke.
“It’s about Cap,” said Eli. “He’s dead and safe and buried, and I can’t let that go.”
“Eli, I miss him too but -― ”
“No man, lemme finish,” said Eli. “I’ve had enough of being quiet. I have to keep quiet about what happened to my Grandpa and to my Uncle Josiah every damn day.”
Sam nodded, slowly.
“Well, I can’t let that go.” Eli said again, clenching his hands around the bottle. “Keeping quiet and leaving Cap’s memory up to them or the tides of politics. I can’t. We have to do something.”
“You mean other than fighting out in the open and staying unregistered?” said Sam, and for a moment, the ghost of a grin flickered on Elijah’s face.
“Well, yeah.”
“Patriot, that’s enough. And I’m not even sure you kids should be doing that.”
“I made my choices when I put on this uniform,” said Elijah. “And my family may have to keep our silence, but I know we’re not the only ones had family screwed over because the government wanted a superhuman army. And folk don’t know this, or don’t wanna know. They’ll cry over Cap, but they won’t talk about who he was fighting for, and why. Not really.
“I think we have to do that. The folks who fought on the anti-regs’ side, registered or not. The folks who believe us. We all have to talk.”
“Man, Eli, you think we haven’t tried? You remember what happened last time Cap tried to talk to a reporter?” Sam said.
“Unfortunately yeah,” Eli said. “But she was an idiot and maybe we were doing it wrong. We can’t rely on the media anyway, with other people pulling their strings. We have to do this ourselves.”
“And you’ve worked out how to do that? Without Stark getting on your back?”
“If he was going to, he would have already.” Eli said. “I’m raising hell for the people we fought for. I’m raising hell for Cap. It’s not enough that the Young Avengers and the others are all out there as anti-reg symbols. We need to be fighting words.”
Sam rubbed his forehead. “You’ve definitely got plenty of that going, kid don’t worry.”
Elijah grinned at him, bright and easy. The first in a long while.
“What did you have mind?”
“Billy and Ted are making a website, and we have all summer,” said Elijah. “Lots of time for us to go out and find folks who got screwed over by the law. Superheroes and people who just happen to have powers. I’m going to ask if they’re ready to talk about the law and what else it’s done. And we’re going to tell people what the hell is wrong with their brave new world.”
“They’ll try to shut you down. They don’t wanna hear it, Eli.”
“Never stopped us Bradleys from doing what needs to be done,” said Elijah. “Come on man. This is the right thing and you know it. You and Buck are carrying on for him- I got to do it too.”
Redwing glared at him, eyes bright and golden. Elijah simply stared back. What, man? He thought.
“I know some folks who might want to speak up,” Sam finally said. “And Bucky and I have got your back. We’re there if you need us.”
#
Sam is not unfamiliar with loss. Or with the process of rebuilding in its aftermath.
He saw Patriot out, watched as the boy walked to the end of the street, then turn to look up at Sam and wave his hand in a farewell. Or a salute.
He thought of Steve leaning against the spot where Sam stood now, arms folded across his chest. Awake when most souls were asleep and Sam was just stirring, quietly looking out where Elijah would have gone.
“Steve, man, the things you start,” Sam said aloud.
He could hear Steve’s laughter, warm and familiar, palpable as love.
Author: adn_heming
Fandom: 616
Prompt: | Falcon (Sam Wilson), Patriot (Eli Bradley) | Gen | Conversation (s) about Steve and other matters
Rating: Gen
Word Count: 4,000
Disclaimer: The characters and settings featured in this story are the property of Marvel Entertainment. This is a work of homage and no copyright infringement is intended.
Author’s notes: This fic owes a lot to the mad betaing skills of lilacsigil, xenokattz and caia_comica. They answered far and beyond the calls of duty and without them, the story would not have evolved to what it is now. Thank you guys!
All remaining mistakes and typos are my own
x-posted to marveloustales
Sam Wilson is not unfamiliar with loss.
Years ago, when Sam was twelve and Sara not much older, their father had been murdered in the streets of Harlem by the wayward son of a member of his own congregation. Hannah Johnson, who’d tried so hard to keep her son on the straight and narrow, hugged Darlene Wilson at the funeral and wept while Sam and Sara glared at her from their mother’s side. As if in retaliation for their lack of generosity, Darlene was killed a few years later.
Death haunts the people that Sam loves. Every now and then, she reminds him of her due with the soft beat of her wings: A bullet wound, a hospital bed, a night’s vigil, every now and then, a coffin.
Sam couldn’t stand guns. He never could.
And he should have known better.
Steve, beloved as he was, the hero of World War II and ― let’s face it, their blond-haired and blue eyed boy - had never been immune. Not in their line of work. Not with villains and monsters howling to bring down the man they saw as America’s herald. Not amid a corrupt government and a public so fickle that they’d agree to hunting down and arresting Captain America, because he’d refused to follow an unjust law. Steve wasn’t immune then, and he certainly wasn’t immune now, in the midst of a superhero civil war.
It was the way of the world they lived in, Sam thought, bitter, and not quite resigned when the doctor emerged from the operating room in defeat. The world just had it in for the people Sam loved. That was it.
#
After the wake, Luke Cage and the others kicked them out of the Avengers. For the typical, heroic reasons. Lay down your arms, go back to school, then maybe, when you’re old enough to make decisions of that magnitude and decide this is what you want to do, come back. If this is what you want.
“There’s no telling what the others will do now,” they said. Cap had kept Stark in check ― and now that check was gone. He wouldn’t have wanted them mixed up in what Stark and his goons might do.
Bullshit, Eli had said. That might have been true, to an extent, but Cap would also have wanted them to do what was right. Eli chose to honour the latter. He'd grabbed what remained of his group and kept on fighting. If Stark wanted them to stop, he’d have to arrest them.
But after a few run-ins, a few televised skirmishes between Avengers and Avengers Corporate, Eli realized what got the others so spooked. Stark was fighting dirtier, pulling tooth and nail to bring any remaining anti-regs into the fold. Never mind supervillains, madmen, falling debris from buildings and actual civilians in peril.
What the hell? Even after Cap?
“He has justify losing Cap,” Kate said. They’re in the old Avengers mansion in one of their days together, and she’s lying stomach down on the floor. He stares and she shrugs her shoulders, weary with knowledge. “If the world isn’t exactly the way he needs it to be, after all that, he’d have lost Cap for nothing.”
“That’s messed up, Kate.”
“Hey, never said he was otherwise. And we all deal the way we deal.”
Yet the stormtroopers never came goose-stepping up to their homes, their schools. In part that was Billy’s doing: an incantation that placed a mental disconnect between their superhero and private identities. It was placed there at Steve’s and Faith’s insistence: a cover that lets them go about their daily lives until they need to break it to save the world. But surely, a niggling voice at the back of Eli’s mind said, Stark’s got better, more experienced mystics at his disposal? He could use them to break it at any time.
Eli doesn’t dwell on Stark much. He can deal by playing Caesar. Eli’s dealing by fighting on.
He’s Patriot. He’s a Young Avenger, Faith and Isaiah Bradley’s grandson and fighting on in spite of an unjust law. No one’s taking that, anymore than they could have taken from Cap what he was.
Who loved him, and what he had stood for.
#
Sam turned himself in to sign. He would be registered: all nice and legal.
He knew what Steve would say to that, but he’d be damned if he’d leave Steve alone to the wolves. Their old friends wouldn’t just bury him: they’d use Steve as an emblem for their brave new world and never mind what the man had believed. So Sam swallowed the bitterness that welled up in him and went to make a deal with the devil.
Stark had looked like hell. Nightmares had drawn shadows under his eyes. He had everything he’d fought for, and he was broken in his victory.
“I’m signing your damn Act,” Sam snarled. Redwing hissed in psychic sympathy, primed for a fight against enemies to the nest. Steve’s absence left Sam raw and ragged: he was in no mood to be generous. “Most of us are. You got what you wanted Stark, so fucking live with it.”
“I fought for what was necessary Sam,” Stark corrected. “Do you think I wanted this?”
“You sure as hell did everything you could to bring it about.”
“I didn’t want this. I did everything humanely possible to prevent it.”
“Asking him to betray his friends? Hounding him down when he said no? Parading him for a mob? That was all for Steve?”
Stark opened his palm, Caesar bequeathing gifts. “What do you want Sam? It’s yours.”
They both left that battleground scarred and bleeding, Sam with promises that could easily be broken and Stark with the shattered remnants of his victory. Assuage it with all the compromises you want, Sam thought bitterly, Steve would still be dead.
He returned to the Avengers ― the real Avengers, in Sam’s mind ― to celebrate Steve’s memory. He would have to leave their friends for good, if he didn’t want to do them any harm.
That thought cast a gloom over everyone’s mind: not whether Sam would betray them, but how he would fare cut off from his comrades-in-arms, alone in a world where his friend was dead and Stark was King.
“Take care, Sam,” Hawkeye said, standing on tiptoe to give him a hug.
“Yeah,” Patriot said. “We’ve got your back, when you need it.”
Sam cut him short. “Kid, that’s a bad idea.”
“We’re not ki―”
“Yeah you are.” Sam shot back. He didn’t care if he insulted their pride, if he got them to listen. “Stark and I may have got an understanding but there are no guarantees. He decides to come after you? He knows you and me are friendly. That’s it. You’re all done.”
“You guys can’t make us stop being who we are,” said Eli. The kid had Steve’s clear-eyed look, the utter conviction, too missed and too familiar.
The hook in Sam’s heart twists, just a little. “Maybe not,” Sam said quietly, “But none of you are getting killed or dragged through the mud on our watch.” He turned to go, to leave his friends and comrades-in-arms for good.
#
When S.H.I.E.L.D. had first went after the kids, Steve freaked. Quietly, and not in the way of panicky parents whose kids were out in the dark, but in hushed, drawn-out anger and disbelief, as he and Sam lay awake in their bunk.
“Isaiah Bradley’s grandson,” Steve said. He hadn’t said anything when they first took the kids out of the power-dampeners, but Sam knew, the minute Steve had laid his eyes on Patriot and the other Young Avengers. The condition they had been left in, when the cape-killers were done. “Do you know what would happen if the government got their hands on him, legally?”
And the thought of that chilled Sam, tucked up against Steve’s back. He knew of Isaiah, of Josiah X and the lengths to which the government had gone to create them, and then to cover it up. There was no doubt they could make a teenage boy disappear, if that’s what they wanted.
And he knew Steve knew that too. Sam watched him lying awake in the dark, eyes fixed on some inscrutable point, haunted by the ghosts of the dead who were wronged, and Isaiah as he might have been. Sam reached out to shake his shoulder and shake him firmly back into the present. But the ghosts were stubborn: they stayed and multiplied.
“Wanda’s children,” Steve whispered. “Scott’s daughter. My God, what does Tony think he’s doing?”
“Shhh,” Sam had whispered. “It’s okay. The kids are okay. Thanks to you.”
“Today they are,” Steve had said, and turned, settling his head against Sam’s shoulder.
#
The first time Elijah Bradley talked to the Falcon, really talked in the way of padawans and jedi knights he had been too furious to think straight.
It was a lot of things. Bill Foster had just died; Billy was gone; Ty and Tandy and Cassie too, in the way that hurt the most. But then he’d had the idiocy to turn on the news.
It was nothing new. Nothing but a variation on what people had said about him before, when Patriot and the Young Avengers were new and later when they had become the Avengers’ protégés. No different from what people said when Cap turned, and never mind that S.H.I.E.L.D. came after Luke Cage and his family in their own home. But Elijah felt like he’d been forced to swallow one bitter pill too many and stalked off to clear his head, hunched in civilian clothes. All their beliefs, their lived reasons for fighting the law was erased, invalidated, by the assumption that the anti-regs were nothing more than Cap’s starry-eyed followers, and never mind that most of them had rebelled long before Cap went rogue.
“That’s what happens when you’re associated with the man,” the Falcon said when he caught up with him. He was in civvies then, a black jacket and plain blue jeans. He cocked his head at Eli. “Everything you do and everything you are becomes all about him, even if that’s not true.”
“What man, now you’re a telepath with people too?” Elijah couldn’t help himself but the Falcon didn’t seem to take offence.
“Son, I ain’t blind or deaf,” The Falcon said. “And I know a bit of what that’s like.”
“Look, I respect the guy,” love him, Eli would have said, if love had been in his vocabulary for those outside his immediate family. But even after he and Cap had made peace, their mentorship was still fraught with the living ghost of Isaiah Bradley and the ghosts of the men who hadn’t made it. Not his fault, and not his crime, but they lingered.
And he would never tell Sam Wilson, hero, Steve Roger’s best friend that it galled Eli that what he did and what he believed was put all on Cap. Never mind the sad-eyed man at home, the steel-eyed woman who had fought red tape and evil men to free him and raise and protect their family.
“Yeah kid, I know,” Sam Wilson said, softly, and for a moment, Elijah is freaked and wonders if Sam Wilson’s telepathy extends just a little bit beyond birds. “But it sucks all the same. Sucks for him too. People see a symbol that’s failed them instead of a man with something to say. All our politics are being swept aside because it suits them.”
“‘Cause they don’t want to think about Luke Cage and his family getting the knock on the door,” Eli spat. “Or the lady who runs one of our safehouses whose granddaughter can fly, but doesn’t want to be a superhero. Or what they did to Tommy before we got him out. If I didn’t have to keep quiet about what happened to Grandpa and Uncle Josiah I’d ― ”
Throw what happened to his grandfather and uncle in the face of the American people and in Stark’s. Ask them if a government capable of that, of having the gall to demand the Bradleys’ continued silence, should be trusted with the kind of power they demanded. But he did have to keep quiet: a sacred mantra had been drummed into him by his Grandma Faith and by his Mom. It was the price they paid for keeping Isaiah and Josiah safe. Elijah balled his fists into the pockets of his jackets. Anger was such a useless thing, these days.
Stark and the people on his side didn’t get it. Or maybe they did and didn’t care. His beliefs were far from a starry-eyed mistake undertaken on Captain America’s behalf, but they used the glamour of the man to sweep them all aside.
“Easy man,” Sam Wilson said and reached out to grasp his shoulder.
“Look man, I know, but folks will think what they want,” Sam said. “You know you didn’t put that uniform on for him; and you know you’re not fighting this war for him either: it’s the opposite. He’s fighting it with us. You know it. Cap knows it. That’s all that matters.”
Eli snorted. “And to hell with what everyone else believes.”
“Yes,” Sam said.
“You guys all sound like Grandma Faith.”
“Wise woman,” Sam said. “Listen man, we gotta go. There are cape-killers around, and Steve and me, we swore we’d get you back to her and your Grandpa in one piece.”
#
Sometimes when he woke up, Sam could feel Steve. The breath of Steve’s rueful laughter at the back his neck, felt Steve’s eyes on him as he woke with a start and turned over to find nothing but an absence. He would walk into his flat, turn on the light and think for an instant that he saw a familiar silhouette asleep on the couch.
Sam got by. There were folks who needed his help.
There were the folks of Harlem: kids in danger of ending up on the wrong side of the law, families barely holding together, people who needed to run from the monsters that lurked there. And there were new people who come to Sam’s office for advice: people who had gotten into accidents that should have killed them but gave them the gift of flight, telekinesis, or what-have-you. Sam gave them their legal options and sent the more desperate ones to the underground.
He kept track of the kids ― Steve’s kids, as Sam thought of them, even though he knew they would object and Steve would definitely raise an eyebrow. But Steve had trained them, taught them to move and think as part of a team, as comrades-in-arms.
And considering what they’re still getting up to, in spite of everything, there’s no doubt that they share his convictions.
Sam slumped his shoulder at every headline, every Frontline column that blasts the Young Avengers for being dangerous and reckless, blindly devoted to Steve Rogers’ cause even after the man had surrendered and admitted he was wrong. But the corners of his lips couldn’t help tugging in a smile.
“The things you left behind, man,” he said aloud, to Steve’s ghost.
Sam doesn’t think Stark and his cape-killers will go after the kids - the Young Avengers are all that’s left of a better time and hard as it is Sam to admit or understand, given the things Stark’s done, Steve still means something to the man. But Stark might surprise him in the worst way possible, so he keeps tabs in any way he can, as much he can.
Lucky New York City is full of birds and no one thinks anything of birds in school yards.
#
Oh man who do you think you’re kidding? Elijah thought, looking up at a familiar silhouette in the sky. Not a peregrine: Elijah’s no expert with birds, but he knows enough to recognize Redwing. What the hell, Falc.
It’s a darker world now: that much is undeniable. People went missing from Eli’s school, and the grapevine says that they had to register, and that they were now in the Initiative.
It chilled Eli, who didn’t know if this was simply part of the world they now lived in, or a subtle language of a threat.
Eli often wondered how the others are ― Sam and the Secret Avengers. They still refused to make contact with the Young Avengers, and that probably wouldn’t change in the near future unless his own team forced the issue.
Too dangerous and too big, Bucky had told him, that day in Cap’s loft. What he and Sam were doing, what the Avengers were untangling wasn’t for the Young Avengers, and least of all, for the kid everyone thought of as Captain America’s protégé, dressed in his colours.
Never mind that Eli had fought a war with him, too. That fact didn’t seem to register with anyone, and so once again, Eli was left alone with Steve Rogers’ ghost.
He was a gentle, melancholy thing that sits between Eli and his grandfather as they play a game of checkers or cards, hand tucked under his chin as he watches their moves. He was there in the room with Isaiah as he watches old children’s cartoons, his own eyes sadder than ever. Elijah isn’t sure these days what his grandfather understood and didn’t, but he was pretty sure he knew Steve was gone. Isaiah grew listless towards the end of the week, watching the windows for a familiar blonde-haired figure, tracked the room for someone who should be there to play cards with and talk about the war.
Steve loomed large when the Bradley family could stand to turn on the news.
There was a slight shift in the rhetoric now. People were angry, now that he was gone, sure he’d been silenced. Suddenly, what they believed ― what Steve had argued and fought for ― was no longer selfish or short-sighted or treason. Now that he was dead it was safe to wonder whether he had been right.
Sometimes that’s what it takes, the ghost of Steve said, stretched out on the chair in Eli’s room, relaxed as a cat. At least they’re talking now, and maybe that will lead to something.
Maybe.
Eli remembers when they scouted buildings together during the war, when they talked politics and of Eli’s family back home ― and the anger and grief just *hits* him.
“I don’t know man,” he said aloud in his room to the empty air. “Seems unfair to me. Someone up there has a lousy sense of humour.” Cap’s life for a maybe. What a sucky deal.
Steve’s ghost smiled at Eli, sad and rueful.
We move on from here, he told him. What else can we do?
Move on.
#
Eli can’t let this go. There has to be something.
#
“Chick,” Redwing said, out of the blue.
Steve would crack up, Sam thought. As it was, he gave Morgan James, six years old, a gentle smile and a teddy bear from the toy box collection as he handed her to child services. Mom missing, a three year old brother, and she didn’t know who else to call. She’d found Sam’s number in her Mom’s coat pocket and rang.
“Chick!” Redwing insisted. Sam can feel the insistent beat of his wings.
Sam received a mental image in his mind’s eye: a handsome boy in a blue hooded jacket, hands tucked in his pockets, looking up at the sky. At him. At the falcon overhead.
“Man,” Sam Wilson told his bird: “Patriot’s gonna be pissed when he finds out you called him that.”
#
“What the hell are you doing, man?”
“Can I come in?” Eli asked, as if there wasn’t the threat of Avengers Corporate and Stark at their backs. Sam Wilson glowered.
“Yeah, you’d better,” he said and lets the boy named Patriot inside.
Steve’s ghost lingered inside the flat, as he does everywhere else. There’s a photo of him and Sam in civilian clothing at the bookshelf, beside a weathered, battered copy of Mark Twain.
“Elijah, what is this about?” Sam asked, rubbing the back of his head. He hands him a Coke.
“It’s about Cap,” said Eli. “He’s dead and safe and buried, and I can’t let that go.”
“Eli, I miss him too but -― ”
“No man, lemme finish,” said Eli. “I’ve had enough of being quiet. I have to keep quiet about what happened to my Grandpa and to my Uncle Josiah every damn day.”
Sam nodded, slowly.
“Well, I can’t let that go.” Eli said again, clenching his hands around the bottle. “Keeping quiet and leaving Cap’s memory up to them or the tides of politics. I can’t. We have to do something.”
“You mean other than fighting out in the open and staying unregistered?” said Sam, and for a moment, the ghost of a grin flickered on Elijah’s face.
“Well, yeah.”
“Patriot, that’s enough. And I’m not even sure you kids should be doing that.”
“I made my choices when I put on this uniform,” said Elijah. “And my family may have to keep our silence, but I know we’re not the only ones had family screwed over because the government wanted a superhuman army. And folk don’t know this, or don’t wanna know. They’ll cry over Cap, but they won’t talk about who he was fighting for, and why. Not really.
“I think we have to do that. The folks who fought on the anti-regs’ side, registered or not. The folks who believe us. We all have to talk.”
“Man, Eli, you think we haven’t tried? You remember what happened last time Cap tried to talk to a reporter?” Sam said.
“Unfortunately yeah,” Eli said. “But she was an idiot and maybe we were doing it wrong. We can’t rely on the media anyway, with other people pulling their strings. We have to do this ourselves.”
“And you’ve worked out how to do that? Without Stark getting on your back?”
“If he was going to, he would have already.” Eli said. “I’m raising hell for the people we fought for. I’m raising hell for Cap. It’s not enough that the Young Avengers and the others are all out there as anti-reg symbols. We need to be fighting words.”
Sam rubbed his forehead. “You’ve definitely got plenty of that going, kid don’t worry.”
Elijah grinned at him, bright and easy. The first in a long while.
“What did you have mind?”
“Billy and Ted are making a website, and we have all summer,” said Elijah. “Lots of time for us to go out and find folks who got screwed over by the law. Superheroes and people who just happen to have powers. I’m going to ask if they’re ready to talk about the law and what else it’s done. And we’re going to tell people what the hell is wrong with their brave new world.”
“They’ll try to shut you down. They don’t wanna hear it, Eli.”
“Never stopped us Bradleys from doing what needs to be done,” said Elijah. “Come on man. This is the right thing and you know it. You and Buck are carrying on for him- I got to do it too.”
Redwing glared at him, eyes bright and golden. Elijah simply stared back. What, man? He thought.
“I know some folks who might want to speak up,” Sam finally said. “And Bucky and I have got your back. We’re there if you need us.”
#
Sam is not unfamiliar with loss. Or with the process of rebuilding in its aftermath.
He saw Patriot out, watched as the boy walked to the end of the street, then turn to look up at Sam and wave his hand in a farewell. Or a salute.
He thought of Steve leaning against the spot where Sam stood now, arms folded across his chest. Awake when most souls were asleep and Sam was just stirring, quietly looking out where Elijah would have gone.
“Steve, man, the things you start,” Sam said aloud.
He could hear Steve’s laughter, warm and familiar, palpable as love.