#like yeah things get to him but he's steve rogers: he's infallible. unflappable

[wingshead]

headcanon / meta post based around de-constructing the thematic qualities in the five-part series man out of time by mark waid.

Bucky: What about you, “Rembrandt?” You oughta start makin’ plans. Steve: If my country wants me to keep serving, I’ll serve. But they might not. Seriously, what purpose does Captain America serve outside of combat? I wouldn’t be surprised if they took the suit and shield and sent me home with every other soldier. Bucky: Ha! They’re gonna have you be the first man to break the sound barrier! First man to climb Mount Everest! Heck, you’re gonna be the first man on the moon! Steve: You think? Bucky: That’s my two cents. So I ask you back: Is that what you want? Steve: I’ll do whatever needs doing. Bucky: That’s not an answer. My brother, you have been running a mile a minute since they shot you up with the super-soldier serum. There is not an American alive who doesn’t owe you (and me) a thousand times over. So, what? Do? You? Want? Steve: Honestly? I just want to sleep.

So right off the bat in the first few pages, it’s pretty clear from the beginning of this mini series that we’re getting a look at a side of Steve that we don’t see very often in the comics, and it directly deals with Steve’s exhaustion & uncertainty. For all his boosting the morale and fighting on the front lines, Steve has an exhaustion with the war and the fact that he for as long as he fought in it, he never stopped working, fighting, and obeying orders the entire time. He has never once complained, other than when he was frustrated in the beginning at not doing more. Minus obeying orders (seeing how for a good portion of his run with the Avengers he’s been the de facto leader/ co-leader of the team), Steve continues on the same way now in the future. He’s strong, he’s fast, he’s got enhanced stamina and agility and an eidetic memory. He’s dedicated to the cause : both as a man wanting to do the right thing, and as a soldier wanting to serve his country.

And Steve is very much a soldier, he may have only fought in World War II for a number of years, but he’s fought in many other wars afterwards, and fought alongside other men as well - both as Steve Rogers and Captain America.

But unlike the other GIs and men out in the battlefield that had something or someone to come back to, Steve didn’t. Even back then. He didn’t have family left to go home to : didn’t have a girl. Didn’t really have any friends either. He’s fully immersed in Captain America: the man has become the symbol, and without the symbol, Steve’s not sure who the man is. The question Bucky asks him, ‘what do you want?’, is a difficult one to answer for Steve, because for all that Stevewants peace in the world and the war to end, he doesn’t know what he’ll do in the absence of having a war to fight. A purpose. Despite the fact that it was a pretty god-awful movie, the line ‘God’s righteous man, pretending he can live without war’ in regards to Steve is a pretty accurate one. Steve is constantly at war : with the world, and with himself. He hasn’t known life without a battle or a fight for most his life. The idea of peace and normalcy is a tempting one, and it’s Steve’s goal, but he doesn’t know what his role would be in a life where he’s no longer needed to be Captain America anymore.

Throughout the five part series, Steve’s thoughts are shown in a recurring type-face in the form of a mission report. It shows his distrust with the people and the world around him, and the fact that even in completely new terrain, Steve’s first instinct is to think like a soldier still in a war, & act like he’s behind enemy lines. The last thing Steve remembers is being thrown from a plane armed with a bomb that Zemo had set, and now he’s waking up to strangers in strange costumes. He fought with the Invaders, and super-beings are not new news to Steve : he’s fought with them, and against them. Considering the last thing Steve remembered was being in enemy terrain, he’s suspicious still of the Avengers at first, and Steve tries to maintain a cover that no longer exists. That never existed. He’s still reporting to his higher up. Steve is using his inner reconnaissance report as a crutch : trying to hold onto something familiar, even though it’s not real.

And then there’s the whole issue around his hallucinations, the people and fantasy that he makes up in his head to cope with the reality he’s faced with. This one…kind of speaks for itself. The fact that Steve on the outside looks very composed and calm with the situation, when the panels seen through his eyes show a very different and more disturbing story. His cavalier attitude freaks a lot of people out, both Rick and the medical staff that Steve sees after being shot, but despite the fact that Steve ACTS like he’s fine waking up in the distant future, the fact that we can see that he’s replacing people in the present with people from his past shows that he’s really, really not dealing with what’s happening to him. it’s obvious that waking up and being faced with a time that’s not his own isn’t something that Steve can readily or easily accept, and it’s traumatized him to the point where he’s had to make up an entire world around him to compensate.

But it’s not only limited to the hallucinations. A few times in the comics Steve has what’s known as the thousand yard stare. A blank, long and limp look that isn’t directed at anything. The thousand yard stare was coined in WWII to correspond with war veterans where the intense trauma they faced had left them haunted, and not all there. It’s reflected in their gaze. The dissociation. And dissociation is exactly what Steve is going through right now. He couldn’t possibly be in a more dissociate state at the moment, with everything and everyone he knows gone from his life forever.

Dr. Dysart: Hang on. You can’t just leave! There’s paperwork and payment and – Steve: Alright, I’ll play along. Call this number. This man will clear everything. Dr. Dysart: There’s only six digits … Wait. President Roosevelt … ? Steve: Tell him I said hello. Dr. Dysart: Son, stop! What did you mean when you said “even here”? Where do you think you are? Steve: Huh.

The issue, and the tail - end to Steve’s conversation with Doctor Dysart really hits home the extent of Steve delusions here, and its only expanded on when he meets Rick on the streets of New York. Steve has deluded himself into believing he’s in a dream, because it’s easier for him to accept the future and the changes if he thinks his mind is making it up and he’ll wake up from it soon. But despite this, he still keeps up appearances, showing that while he’s trying to convince himself all of this isn’t real, a part of him deep down can understand that it isn’t, and he can’t freely give away classified information.

Another one of Steve’s hallucinations, and another way for him to compensate for his loss and not face the reality of it all. He sees Rick, a young kid & a friend of the Avengers, and his mind immediately turns him into Bucky. Bucky, who last he’d seen, had been on top of a plane that had blown up. Bucky, who Steve had asked about when he’d 'woken up’, and didn’t get an answer for. ‘Bucky’ looks the same age as he did when Steve last saw him in 1944, despite the fact that in this 'dream’ of Steve’s they’re decades in the future. “It’s good to see you, partner. I was worried about you.” he tells Rick-Bucky.

The guilt and the fear of admitting that the possibility of Bucky being dead is not something that Steve, at that moment, was equipped to handle.

He chooses instead to use a coping mechanism, replacing Rick’s presence with the image of Bucky’s. But during the entire conversation with Rick, despite Steve seeing him as Bucky, he can hear what Rick is saying and understand clearly how it doesn’t fit in with what Bucky would say. Steve understands this, but he chooses to ignore it. He tries to keep playing along with his little game, and keep up the illusion as long as he can. Desperation, maybe, to see when the 'dream’ will end, how far he has to play along before he can wake up.

And yet.

Yet, despite the fact that Steve believes he’s in a dream, he still remains ultimately unchanged in one of his biggest character traits:

The first thing Steve did when stepping back into New York was rush to the aid of a young woman getting robbed. Despite Rick calling him crazy, and Steve believing he’s in a dream - therefore whatever he does should logically have no real consequence - he decides to help Rick in finding the Avengers.

The illusion doesn’t break in the face of everything that his 'brain’ keeps coming up with – the internet, females as Doctors, foreign languages, modern slang, etc etc – until he’s faced with FDR’s death. It’s what makes the illusion snap inside of Steve’s mind and it breaks him out of his trauma induced delusion forcibly. He ends up leaving Rick and going after the man they’re after himself.

And when Steve finds out it’s an alien, when he’s faced with yet ANOTHER oddity that he couldn’t possibly come up with, faced with the reality that he’s really in the future and Bucky’s not here, faced with his world crumbling around him – all Steve can do is laugh. He laughs. Like it’s funny, because it’s the only thing he can really do. The only other option is cry and grieve and face the fact that he’s lost EVERYTHING.

Despite snapping out of the hallucinations and coming to terms with the reality of things, Steve remains vehemently determined to find his way back home. Despite being impressed and overjoyed w/ the future’s accomplishments, he wants to go home. but despite his stubbornness to go home, he listens to the President’s orders above all else. Bitterness possibly at Tony, for exposing him to all this information, knowing he wouldn’t be able to go home afterwards because of it. Steve’s silent breakdown by the foot of Lincoln’s statue, a small figure in comparison to the cold marble, all by himself with his head in his hands, cuts a very solemn and tragic figure. The juxtaposition between both Steve’s current attitude now - solemn, sad, beaten down - to how his attitude was just earlier in the issue - awed, inspired and impressed - as well as Steve sat hunched in front of the Lincoln Statue, which sits tall and proud, is pretty remarkable.

Steve was impressed by the future but from an outsider’s point of view : like sitting in a class, watching a documentary play. What you see astounds you, but it’s a documentary and it ends, and you go back to your own life. Steve expected that. He expected to go back to his life. The future held many remarkable things but it wasn’t, in his opinion, his time. It wasn’t his world, no matter how much better things seemed. Then you have Steve sitting in front of Lincoln’s statue : two larger than life figures that dedicated themselves to their country. Both etched in time, both someone many people know of. Only Steve’s not standing still in time : he’s just out of it. He’s out of place.

It’s in the fourth issue that you really start seeing the shift in Steve’s attitude. He’s downtrodden : he feels beaten down, lost, and at a crossroads with no clue where to go. Thor’s words, while probably meant in a good natured way, didn’t help. The next few pages show even more examples of the juxtaposition that Steve embodies : he fights alongside the Avengers and accepts his duty, given to him by his President and country, but he doesn’t stop searching for links to his past either. He tries to find evidence of Bucky and Peggy’s existences, and eventually visits his commanding officer, General Jacob Simon. A man from his past, who opens Steve’s eyes to all the corruption and cruelty of the world, when Steve had been shown only the good and the progress by Tony, a man from the future. There’s a clear divide shown, between Steve fighting for peace, justice, and good both on his own against what General Simon tells him about as well as with the Avengers, and Steve being crushed by the weight of all the evil, the injustice, and the cruelty of the modern day world. Being exposed to the horrors.

He feels even less, and less like he belongs, despite having a spot on the Avengers, and while he shows his disgust and disappointment with General Simon, he hides his feelings well from his teammates. He’s distant to them, as seen when Iron Man tells Hank Pym that he barely ever sees Cap anymore. Steve is silently grieving: for his life, and for what he’s woken up into, something he fought to protect and create that’s not as great or beautiful as he thought it would be.

The entire issue is very much reference to the opening conversation between Bucky and Steve at the start of the series: Steve, being tired and wanting to sleep but doing what he’s asked to do, being where he’s needed. Only now Steve has a home he needs to get back to, but the war he’s fighting is more internal and impossible that it’s one he’ll never really come back from, one he hasn’t come back from even in today’s comics.

When Steve is finally, finally transported back to his own time by way of Kang, at first he’s shocked. But shock gives way to relief. Not joy ; not excitement ; relief. Steve is relieved to be back home. But throughout the issue, his expressions mainly seem too serious, too somber to match the eagerness and impatience he’d displayed earlier in the series about getting home. A man even asks him, “How’s it feel to be back home? Pretty terrific, I bet!” 

and Steve pauses for a bit before answering with a ‘it’s good’. But Steve’s not smiling, despite having said he’d missed this just a few seconds earlier, Steve is showing anything but happiness. He’s finally back in his own time, and catching up on things, but – his perspective has changed. Most telling of this fact, is that slowly over the course of the first seven pages, the color fades. It fades so that everyone in the background is in black and white, but Steve stays in color. It’s a total juxtaposition to the first two issues, where Steve hallucinated and imagined everyone in the future / present to be someone from his past. The only difference now is that the people in black and white are the people from his past. The only people in color are the images of his teammates he sees on a circus poster, in place of the actual carnies. The people in the 40s are the ones that Steve knows. Except now Steve knows more. He’s experienced something extraordinary and new : and he’s changed because of it.

Steve has, for all his emotional displacement in the future, adapted mentally to the cultural and societal shifts that it offered and gave. It causes a rift between him and the 1940s, where things are different from what he’d seen in the future, where progress hasn’t yet been made, despite all the issues and problems that had been created in the future, something important happens in this final issue.

Steve realizes that even when he’s home he has no one, nothing to stay for or come back to. It’s shown in his worry and constant thoughts for the Avengers, because they are in the future and they are something he has to go back for. Bucky is not there. Steve feels he can do for the Avengers what he couldn’t for Bucky : Save them. And he does.

Steve: It’s odd. All I wanted was to be back home, Noonan, and now that I am…I don’t feel ready to put down roots. Why is that? Noonan: Eh. We all gotta get readjusted, am I right? Don’t be sad, be proud! We fought the good fight, and the job is done! Steve: It’s not that simple for me. I have…I had these friends…And the last time I was with them, they were in trouble. I couldn’t help Bucky…And now I’ve failed them, too. Noonan: I don’t know what you mean by “failed 'em”, but if it’s that important…there’s nothing you can do? You know what Captain America says, Rogers: “there’s always a way.”

Steve realizes how he doesn’t belong ; not to the future, and not to the past anymore either. Most people when they think of Steve, and hear the words “man out of time”, tend to only associate it with him being a man of the past in the future. And that is true. But that’s only half of it. Steve is a man out of time in all regards. He says it himself in several different medias, in the movies, in the comics, in different eras : he never fit in, even in his own personal life. He always stood out. He didn’t want to, but he did. But the past is what Steve knew: it held his life, and his potential for a normal one after the war. Now Steve is enlightened, he’s seen the future. He’s lived in it. This issue is showing that even when he DID go back to his own time, and had every opportunity to stay, he couldn’t. He didn’t fit in. It didn’t fit him. Steve lives in a future where it’s very much the same, but he actually serves a purpose.

This goes back to the fact that Steve is a man who fights for peace but is at constant war – and is made for it. However much he dreams of a normal life, it’s not in his cards. We can come full circle here, and draw back on Bucky and Steve’s conversation in the beginning: Steve doesn’t know what he wants to do after the war is over. Captain America is what Steve knows best. Fighting the good fight. Living in the 40s, after the war is over and peace reigns is certainly a tempting thought for Steve, but it’s not a realistic option for him. Not anymore. Not with everything he’s learned, and not with how he is. He goes back to help the Avengers because that’s what he’s always done: help. The Avengers gave him a PURPOSE. Steve may not fit in, and he feels a lot of disassociation with the world and the people, the current culture, but he’ll protect it.