#mademoisellebleu

[bedlamsbard]

In Home, how does Steve feel about Howard as person/friend? What I get from your writing is that Howard clearly has a lot of affection and respect for Steve but when I read scenes that they have together Steve just seems very neutral(?) towards Howard. Or am I misinterpreting it?

I don’t mean this as a criticism or anything though I’m just genuinely wondering where Steve’s headspace is at with him. I’m loving your snippets for this upcoming chapter btw 👀

Steve loves Howard and thinks of Howard as a very close friend (and knows that Howard is in love with him and has been for years), but he's extremely aware of what happened to Howard in the future (getting murdered by the Winter Soldier for the serum*) and that he (Steve) is hiding that from Howard. A lot of Steve's interactions with Howard are also colored by his (at this point completely failed) relationship with Tony. Steve's also spent most of the past six years with Tony and knows Tony's mixed-to-negative feelings about Howard, so that's affecting his interactions with Howard. It does mess up a relationship when you know the other guy was in love-slash-obsessed with you and he ended up making it everyone else's problem for the next forty-six years and change because it didn't actually stop when he died. Also definitely his own problem, not just everyone else's. Howard never really accepted that Steve had died in 1945 and it fucked up him and everyone around him for the next forty-six years of his life, and all of Tony's life to the present day. That's a lot for Steve to deal with, even though none of that has happened to 1945 Howard yet.

(Steve and Tony's handful of interactions where Howard comes up are really interesting, because it's very, very clear that they essentially knew two different people -- I could talk about that one scene in CACW for hours.)

Not to mention the last time Steve saw Tony, Tony threw Howard's murder and the shield in his face, both while trying to kill him, so that's also a factor -- and because this is straight-from-the-Battle-of-Wakanda Steve, Steve is also convinced that Tony was killed by Thanos approximately five minutes before Steve landed in 1945, which is information that he really doesn't want to accidentally pass on to Howard. Steve knows that Tony went after Ebony Maw and Stephen Strange in New York and assumes that Tony would have died before giving up the Time Stone; since Thanos arrived in Wakanda with the Time Stone, ergo, Tony is dead. He has no way to know any of the details of the fight on Titan.

Steve's pretty distant from everyone (except Natasha) in 1945, because he still thinks that he's going to have to leave again; the moment he and Natasha have a way back to 2018, they're going to take it. He's terrified of getting too comfortable, too attached, again, because that will make it that much worse when/if he has to go. That goes for Peggy and Howling Commandos as well as for Howard; it's just that none of the others have "your kid tried to kill me about your murder two years ago" hanging between them. And that's a pretty heavy thing to conceal. By this point Howard and Peggy and the Commandos know that Tony hates Steve and tried to kill him, since it's come up a few times, but the absolute last thing that Steve wants Howard to find out is the circumstances of that particular event. (Especially because Bucky's survival has not been revealed.) Howard won't push Steve to have a deeply emotional conversation the way Peggy has done on several occasions, so Steve hasn't had to explain any of it to him yet. Which in a way is something of a relief to Steve because he doesn't want to have deeply emotional conversations, but it does mean that there's a wall between them. Howard is too purely relieved to have him back to push at all.

None of this is explicitly stated, because Steve's just not going to think it explicitly or say it out loud to anyone without some very specific prompting that hasn't happened yet, but that's the logic behind Steve's interactions with Howard. The closest he comes to thinking about it is probably in Chapter 6, during the scenes about the shield.

* I can't remember if it's come up explicitly in Home -- I'm guessing not because I don't think Steve or Natasha would have any reason to know -- but the circumstances of Howard's murder in Home are the same as in Horizon, i.e. he found out that SI and the U.S. Army were working on a super soldier serum, threw a fit, and was taking it to SHIELD when Alexander Pierce had him and Maria killed. It's not relevant here, but like with most of my backstories, this one is the same between the two universes.