[video by: voordeel;
music: Losing My Religion by REM]
"All The Angels and The Saints" by Speranza -- In which Steve Rogers loses God and finds God and loses God, and also: Bucky.
This is a wonderfully written, lengthy, full life epic of Steve 'n Bucky. It's especially interesting in its depiction of socialist and free thought in Depression-era Brooklyn, which Steve really gets into while dragging Bucky along with him. Steve's lost faith reasserts itself, however, when he is convinced that God performed a miracle by turning him into a supersoldier and allowing him to rescue Bucky. But later he turns his back on God once again when he learns of the inhumane suffering that Bucky has endured during his years as the Winter Soldier.
I'm quoting a few more excerpts than usual, just to give a sense of the author's command of Steve's spiritual progression and regression.
Excerpts:
[1934]
"You're driving me crazy with this bullshit!" Bucky shouted, slamming down a box of tinned pears in the alley behind Mr. G's grocery store.
"No, wait, listen, just listen, will you?" Steve was perched on top of a stack of crates clutching his copy of Bertrand Russell in both hands. "He says—listen—'There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in Hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.'" He looked up. "What do you think of that?"
Bucky sighed and leaned against the wall, wiping sweat from his brow with his forearm. "I don't get you, I really don't. The truth is that nobody knows anything, okay? So if nobody knows anything, why not know the best possible thing? That there's a God and we're in?"
"Because it's passive," Steve shot back. "Because everything that's ever been accomplished has been accomplished by people coming together and putting themselves out there, not just standing around waiting for some miracle to—"
. . . .
[1943]
It was one thing to pray – Steve had been praying hard ever since Bucky was drafted – but it was something else to have God answer back. Steve was terrified, ecstatic: his life had become one miracle after another. His every prayer had been answered: he'd been taken into the Army, he'd been given strength, health, purpose; the means to fight evil on earth. Even Agent Carter – he had never even imagined a woman like her, and yet here she was, like God had picked her for him—or more likely, had made him for her.
He felt the hand of God in everything, now, moving him like a chess piece on a board–-all across the United States, and then to Europe--so he was hardly even surprised when his U.S.O. show turned up at the 107th just after their defeat at Bolzano. He knew why he was there: what God had put him there to do.
. . . .
[1944]
"The whole point of faith," Bucky said, returning to his first topic, "is that there's no proof. If there's proof, then you don't need faith. If there was a God, which there's not, he wouldn't do that, which he didn't."
"I'm not going to argue with you. I was there, I know what God did. Besides," Steve added, "what about the burning bush?" and Bucky burst out laughing and said, "Who are you, Moses? You think you're Abraham, or-- I just, I can't even, the ego on you. You know, now I know there's no God, because if there was, you would burst into flame. God doesn't work like that: he doesn't make deals, and if he did, he wouldn't just make 'em with you. People are losing brothers, lovers, sons - millions are going to die in this goddamned war and you know what, Steve? They all prayed just as hard as you," and later, when Bucky died--
When Bucky died
When Bucky died, Steve remembered how he'd said that God doesn't work like that. And Bucky was right, of course: you couldn't bargain with God, there was no deal to be made. Man proposes, God disposes. God had given him Bucky, and God had taken him back. Steve understood now: if God had given him this body, this mission, it was for God's own unknowable purpose. Steve's only duty was to be humble, and to serve.
Steve went to church, and then he went to the pub and sat in the ruins and drank a bottle of whisky that he couldn't feel until Peggy came and got him. And then there was only the mission: going after Schmidt, fighting until every member of Hydra was dead or captured. And it wasn't until he was on the plane, nose-diving into the Arctic with enough atomic bombs to blow up the entire eastern seaboard, that Steve realized that God had given him a last gift and answered his final prayer: just please, don't let Bucky get killed, or let me go with him, let me get killed, too. He'd only had to survive ten days without Bucky.
God had given Steve everything he'd ever asked for. He died grateful.
....
[2014]
Steve read the file Natasha got for him: read about the surgeries, the mechanical arm, the cryo-freeze, the mind-wipes and electroshocks. He read coldly written mission reports about the asset: what the asset had accomplished; what damage the asset had sustained; where the asset should next be deployed. Then Steve went down to the S.H.I.E.L.D. gymnasium to go a few rounds with the heavy bag, and when it split open he just kept going, and when the reinforcements snapped he just kept going, and he kept going until he heard Sam whistle and say, in that calm, lazy way he had: "Man, your arms are too short to box with God."
Steve looked up, hair and clothes drenched with sweat, and saw that he'd destroyed that whole corner of the gymnasium: there was broken glass and wrenched metal everywhere. Through a fragment of broken mirror, he saw a number of S.H.I.E.L.D. and C.I.A. agents huddled nervously together in the hallway; he later learned that one of them had called Natasha, and Natasha had taken one look into the gymnasium and told Sam Wilson to get his ass over here, stat. He looked over at them and they scuttled away, frightened.
"Fuck God," Steve said, ripping the tape off his boxing gloves with his teeth. "They beat him like a dog, Sam. Did you read it? What they did to him? Everything they--they beat him like a dog, Sam." I’m not a good dog, Bucky'd written to him, five minutes ago, a million years ago. But they'd made him one anyway.
"God didn't do it," Sam said.
"God didn't stop it," Steve snarled. "What kind of God wouldn't stop it? Is it a joke? Is this a reward or a punishment – give me what I've prayed for, but it's this? What am I supposed to take away from this?"
"Why the hell is this about you?" Sam asked him. "I thought it happened to him," and Steve lost it then, pressed his shoulder against the cracked mirror and sobbed silently until he could get control of himself.
. . . .
"Bucky," Steve said, agonized.
"Shut up," Bucky said. "Please just fucking shut up. Don't tell me we're going to make this right. Or that things happen for a reason. And don't you dare tell me that God made you Captain America to save me, because then I have to believe that you think God threw me down the shitter just to teach you a lesson about—about--"
"Humility," Steve croaked.
"Humility!" Bucky shouted, outraged, furious, and then he was laughing. "The nerve of you—I could beat you to death with your own shield.Humility, he says. You fucking— You think God loves you more than me? Or Dr. Wilkinson, who bled out onto the sidewalk, who I can't fix, who nobody can fix?" His head dropped into his hands. "Fuck, I miss Steve. Goddammit! Goddamn you!—you took him from me and he was all I had!" Bucky's face was twisted in pain. "I want Steve back. What would Steve tell me?"
Steve heard himself answering. "He'd tell you there's no meaning in this. No lesson. It's just what happened to us." He had Bucky's full attention now; Bucky was nodding at him. "And that life's hard enough--"
"-- without lies on top of it," Bucky said distantly.
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