(someone asked about the full version of this, so here u go)





“Wait,” says Sam, “you had a publicist?”



“For my first five months at S.H.I.E.L.D,” says Steve. “Then she quit. Uh, decisively.”

“Well yeah, she had to keep you in line,” Bucky says with a half-smirk. “How many times did you make that poor lady want to sock you in the face?”

“Lost count,” Steve admits. “I did offer to let her, once. Seemed fair.”

Sam laughs. “I feel like you’re sitting on a story here.”

“There’s no story,” Steve tells him. Sam raises his eyebrows. Bucky’s half-smirk tilts towards a full smirk. “Seriously,” Steve repeats, “no story.”





Interlude: The Story of Steve “Walking PR Nightmare” Rogers, and How For a Short While He Single-Handedly Destroyed the Emotional Health of Eva Laura Ortiz, His Now Ex-Publicist

The Friday Eva’s firm signed a contract with Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, her best friend took her out for emergency drinks, and she spent the next three hours trying not to cry into a series of cocktails.

“A Masters in communications at Georgetown, and this is what it gets me,” she moaned, as Yumi patted her back consolingly between vodka gimlets three and four. “Fucking superheroes. All that work on my thesis, but nope, here is my destiny, to stand at a podium in a blazer and say, ‘Sorry half of Manhattan got smushed, promise it will somehow, somehow never happen again.” She made a jabbing motion with her glass, which was thankfully still too empty to splash anyone. “Also P.S. the smushing was unavoidable and we’re not planning on fixing it, hope you all had renter’s insurance—’”

“If it’s any comfort,” said Yumi, “I really doubt the blazer’s mandatory. People’ll be way too focused on the carnage to police your clothes. You could probably get away with a nice blouse, or even a dress, as long as it’s office-appropriate—”

Eva didn’t decide to put her head on the bar, it just wound up there. Gravity. “Could’ve gone back to grad school again,” she said. “Instead I’m gonna be press secretary to the only government org that moonlights as a demolition company—”

“Look on the bright side,” Yumi told her. “At least you’re not working PR for Tony Stark.” She broke off to flag down the bartender before that line of reasoning could continue, which was probably for the better. When that was your consolation, it meant the water was so far above your head, you were on the seafloor.

Eva was hungover for much of the weekend, but when she came in on Monday, her lingering nausea evaporated in the face of some amazing news.

“Captain goddamn AMERICA” she texted Yumi on her lunchbreak, because there was no way in hell this could wait until happy hour. “Drinks are on me tonight. And also, forever.”

It was all the thrill of representing a celebrity, none of the risk of having to someday fish him out from beneath a mountain of cocaine and strippers. He was a national hero, everybody loved him, everyone in the world wanted to interview him, hell, Eva’s mom knew who he was—she had officially stumbled onto the easiest job in the universe.

Worst case scenario, maybe Steve Rogers had come out of the ice with certain old-timey values intact—your standard-issue racist grandpa, only hot. Still, Eva could do damage control. She’d built her name on it. Her first week at the firm, a congressman had drunkenly crashed his car into a funeral procession for a local war hero, and she’d gotten him out of the news cycle and into rehab so fast, her boss’s head had spun. If Rogers turned out to be religiously intolerant or homophobic or prone to condescending remarks about women, if he needed constant coaching to adjust to the modern world, well, Eva could deal with it from atop her giant pile of money. She would explain Twitter every day if she needed to.

Captain America. Seriously. Easy Street.

She met Steve for the first time two days later, in a coffee shop at the outskirts of the city. He’d been de-thawed for about a week, but honestly the guy still seemed jumpy. He flinched at the sound of the cappuccino maker, and his eyes swept the shop constantly, as if at any moment this meeting could become a battle scenario. At least he didn’t seem surprised by cell phones, or how much it cost to get a coffee. Someone must’ve given him a crash course on the future.

“So,” she said, leaning back in her chair. She’d read that imitating body language was a good way to set people at ease but it seemed to make him suspicious. “What are your plans for the weekend?”

“Should catch up on my laundry,” said Steve. He tried to hunch his shoulders, but they were too wide for it to work. “And I’ve got a library book to read.”

“Oh? What book?” she said, smiling indulgently. At the back of her mind she was picturing one of those Time magazine hardcovers about the Greatest Generation.

“A biography of someone named Cesar Chavez?” said Steve. “A lady from the teacher’s union recommended it to me. She was real nice, I’m probably gonna go to their rally on Saturday—they’re striking for better pay—and then Sunday there’s a protest for the rights of undocumented immigrants, so.“

Eva’s jaw worked for a second. “Steve, I can’t force you not to go, but if Captain America gets arrested at a protest, it’s going to get a lot of attention—”

Steve coughed politely. “That’s…kind of the point of a protest,” he said.

‘Well,’ thought Eva, ‘Shit.’

Something else she didn’t see coming: it turned out Captain America was basically a communist.

“More of a socialist, really,” he said, when she tiptoed toward the matter over lunch on Monday. Luckily, there hadn’t been any fallout from his weekend. It wasn’t that the media had suddenly developed a sense of restraint, more that neither protest had been deemed worthy of press coverage in the first place. Of course, if he kept at it, he would become the reason for said coverage.

“Went to meetings sometimes,” he was saying now, “but I worked a lot and I was pretty much always sick so sometimes I couldn’t—” He gestured vaguely with his chopsticks, then indicated the stone bowl in front of him. “This is really good, what is it?”

“Bi bim bop,” she replied, mostly on auto-pilot, still trying to process the way he’d shrugged off the question as if it was about something totally innocuous. Ice cream flavors. Sports teams. Favorite models of car. Steve experimentally added another couple dollops of hot sauce to his rice, and then it hit her: “Oh my god,” she said, “you slept through the fifties.” He looked up from his bowl blankly. She stared at him. “The whole thing. You missed the entire Red Scare—”

Steve set down the hot sauce. “The what,” he said. Apparently in the time since he’d resurfaced, his handlers had briefed him on coffee prices, but not on the legacy of McCarthyism. This was one of the things that drove her crazy about S.H.I.E.L.D.: they used “need-to-know-basis” like a mantra, even in situations where it made no sense, or where it was transparently a shitty long-term strategy. Were they planning on keeping America’s skeletons in the closet from him forever? Were they rationing them out, one atrocity per week, like the world’s most depressing advent calendar?

He was bound to figure it out someday. Steve was a determined guy, and even if he somehow never discovered Wikipedia, if nothing else, he had a library card. Still, something in the way his eyes narrowed made her stammer,

“Uh, nothing, never mind, it’s fine. The word ‘socialist’, uh, means something different now, so it’s no longer really accurate to describe yourself like that. Just, if reporters ask or something.”

Steve retrieved his chopsticks and she changed the subject, but Eva had the distinct sense she was going to pay for it later. If in no other way, then karmically.

She was right about that much, at least.

For an all-American war hero with a giant surplus of public goodwill on his side, Steve had a knack for making enemies. He didn’t smush Manhattan, or do drugs or get drunk or make passes at married people (or interns or waitstaff or anyone, as far as Eva could tell. The only woman in his life was a 94-year-old he visited in the hospital sometimes, and not even the grossest tabloids were making implications there. Yet.)

The problem was his mouth.

First there was that brief period of time before the rabble-rousing got off the ground, where his main hobby seemed to be pissing off important people. Eva learned to dread the approach of elderly senators and statesmen, the way they shook Steve’s hand and leaned into his space to mutter, conspiratorially, “The country’s not like it used to be, is it?” It was like the ticking of a bomb that only Eva could hear.

"You’re right,” said Steve, the third time it happened, “nobody dies of the flu and I can’t get arrested for marrying a black person.”

Then there was the rabble-rousing itself. It wasn’t just that Steve actively, loudly threw his full weight into his causes, although he did, all the time. (“You couldn’t just show your support by wearing a nice, tasteful ribbon?” Eva muttered. “That’s a great idea,” said Steve, “I’ll wear it at the rally!”). His love of underdogs meant he could never, ever keep it simple and back the easy crusades.

Asked a question about crime—any question, any crime—and he invariably made it about poverty. Asked about poverty, and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to his rant about institutionalized classism and racism.

“Would you look at that, guess you guys still know the word ‘socialist’ after all,” said Steve dryly, surveying the morning edition’s strongly worded letters to the editor.

“You couldn’t talk to me before sending an op ed to the New York Times?” Eva moaned. “You didn’t stop to think maybe it was the kind of thing your publicist should hear about?”

“Gosh, ma’am,” he said, opening his eyes wide, “must’ve slipped my mind.”

“Don’t you pull that ‘aw-shucks farmboy’ routine on me,” she hissed.

Steve gave her an unimpressed look. “I grew up in Brooklyn.”

“Who even taught you to say socio-economic?” said Eva despairingly.

In the middle of an election season, Steve had sent an editorial to the New York Times singing the praises of labor unions, and harshly condemning Libertarians and fiscal conservatives and Wal-mart and possibly Apple; Eva had only managed to horror-skim it so far. “Did you go around trying to stir up shit back then, too?”

“In Brooklyn? During the Depression?” said Steve. “Um, yes?”

Eva lived in fear of the day a reporter thought to get Steve’s opinion about abortion. Or, God and all the angels forbid, gun control.

She breathed a sigh of relief when he was invited to speak at an anti-bullying conference; what could be more of a crowd-pleaser than siding against bullies? The sigh was short-lived, however. Steve kept to his prepared remarks for about a sentence and a half, and then spent the rest of his allotted time railing about the need for better protections for LGBT kids.





“How is this a hard job?” Yumi said that weekend over drinks. So many drinks. “C'mon, Steve Rogers, he’s such a boy scout.”

“Oh god,” Eva muttered, rubbing her temples, “don’t get him started on the Boy Scouts.”





“Please just do one thing for me,” she said, struggling not to pace. Steve was sitting in the makeup chair, wearing the stupid little paper bib over his suit as a hardened industry professional dabbed him with foundation. Eva had worried, at the beginning, that Steve might object to the whole makeup-for-cameras thing, but he always submitted tamely enough to that. (“I’ve done this dance before,” he’d told her back in that coffee shop, and she’d remembered then the old black-and-white footage, the propaganda reels. The last time he was in the public eye, there had been heavy scripting involved. She was beginning to wonder if this was an accident.)

The styling part was easy. It was everything else that was a struggle.

“Steve, once you’ve—” Eva remembered to cut herself off before she said ‘apologized’; she got the impression that the only thing he regretted about his last outburst was the fix-it interview he was now stuck prepping for. He looked as grim as if he about to storm the beaches of Normandy, not a mid-rate early morning talk show. “—made amends,” she said instead, “they’re gonna ask some soft questions to humanize you a little. Hobbies, interests, probably some banter about baseball teams or whatever.”

She hesitated; she knew him well enough by now to have an idea of how this conversation was going to go. “I need you to promise me not to mention you’re learning Spanish,” she said. Eva studied her nails, but she could still feel Steve glaring at her. Maybe it was a super soldier thing. Enhanced guilt powers.

“I know it’s shitty,” she added, “but S.H.I.E.L.D. has been facing a lot of image problems lately, and we really need to play up the all-American angle—”

“Lots of Americans speak Spanish,” he said, voice dangerously level.

Eva sighed. “I know that, Steve, but a senator has a soundbite going around about English as the national language, and if you bring this up, it’ll look like you’re taking sides—”

“Maybe I am,” said Steve.

“You’re Captain America, you’re not Captain-Blue-States-and-Urban-Centers,” she said. “Immigration and Mexico and all that, it’s a hot-button issue and we just can’t afford the controversy right now. Maybe later, when the latest S.H.I.E.L.D. fallout dies down a little, but for now, we need you to be apolitical, Steve.”

“How.” Steve’s voice was cold and quiet. “Even if I wanted to be, how would I—” He swallowed. The makeup artist discreetly stepped away. Steve put his hands on his knees, looked up at her. “Sorry if this is—overstepping or anything,” he said, “but Ortiz, that’s a Mexican surname, right?”

“I’m Guatemalan, actually.”

“Oh,” said Steve. “Oh, I’m sorry—”

“It’s fine,” said Eva, shrugging. “Ambiguously brown, it happens, so—”

He shook his head. “That doesn’t make it better,” he said. “I really am sorry.” In the months she’d worked with him, she had never seen him look genuinely apologetic before now, not even after almost getting into a fistfight with that Tea Party governor. Steve ran a hand through his hair, miserable. “Look, if I screw up like that again, you have permission to slug me.”

“I don’t think it would hurt you that much,” she said, and it wasn’t false modesty. Eva lifted weights and she’d mastered plank pose in yoga, but even a career bodybuilder seemed unlikely to do real damage through the layers of protective muscles in those pecs.

“Maybe not physically,” he allowed. “But getting hit never feels great, you know, emotionally.”

She rubbed her temples. “How do you even find the time to make all this trouble—”

“Well,” said Steve, “my social calendar’s, uh, got some room in it lately.”

That was the thing about Steve: even when he was making her job absolute hell, sometimes it was hard not to like him a little.





On the other hand, sometimes it was easy.

Eva stood behind the camera, watching the shitty TV host of the hour put on his most concerned face, tilt his head to his most concerned angle, and ask, “So, Steve. Do you regret taking advantage of your place in the public eye in order to further your own political agenda?”

She watched Steve purse his lips and dutifully recite, “As a public servant, of course I’m proud to serve my country, but I do understand I wasn’t elected—”

His delivery was a little flat, but it wasn’t terrible, and Eva felt a fleeting glimmer of something like hope.

Then his eyes twitched toward the ground and he squared his shoulders and added, “Also, in my defense, I didn’t think it’d still be a controversial thing to say, given that it’s the twenty-first century and we are talking about human beings here, with, you know, certain unalienable rights—”

“No,” shouted the host, jabbing a finger at Steve. “No, you don’t get to come in here after all the mud you’ve been slinging and drape yourself with the Constitution!“

"Declaration of Independence,” Steve corrected reflexively.

Eva hid her face in her hands and sighed.

“It’ll be alright,” Steve said later, on the ride home, when her cell phone kept chiming every second with e-mails, texts, news alerts, the interview was trending on Twitter because of course it was, and she could taste it in her mouth that the next few days were going to be an unending nightmare, “Don’t worry.” He patted her on the shoulder. She looked up, blinking rapidly. “Hey,” he said, with the slightest trace of a smile. “Que sera, sera.”

“Fuck you, Rogers,” she said.

Something else she was learning about Captain America: in addition to being a national inspiration and a paragon of virtue, he was kind of an asshole.





“You’ve got to stop saying things that come off as class warfare—”

Steve whirled around. “Funny how it’s not class warfare to kick the poor around, only to point out that it’s happening—”

“Steve, Fox News is strongly implying you’re a Skrull impersonator—”

“Well,” he said, “I guess I like that better than the freeze-induced brain damage line they had going before, at least this requires a little creativity—”

She forced down the urge to scream. “Jesus, Rogers, a major news network is saying you’re an evil alien. One wrong person hears that and they could take it on themselves to go vigilante-mode on you. This is literally putting your life in danger—”

“If it bothers you that much, we can always just sue them for libel, assuming that’s still something that happens,” Steve snapped. “You still have libel, right? Or has accountability in journalism gone the way of four-digit phone numbers and radio dramas and, and bananas—”

Eva was rapidly losing context for this conversation. “Steve, bananas still exist, I—do you want a banana? I can get you a banana.”

Steve muttered something darkly about “in name only” as Eva took a few slow, deep breaths, and decided that as long as Steve wasn’t actively organizing a boycott on the Chiquita Corporation, it was none of her business.





Eva worked through six weekends in a row. Her life was her job, and her job was mopping up after Steve. It didn’t matter what she did, the spin she executed, there was no way to contain the story. His damage control required damage control.





“You wanna know what the most fucked up part of this whole thing is?” she said, one or two glasses of champagne ahead of where she should’ve been.

“I want to know how you even picked a front-runner,” said Steve. He was still seething from where she’d pulled him away from the president of CBS. They were at some kind of high-class fundraiser. Or rather, they were hiding by the freight elevators because Steve couldn’t even go to a fancy charity event without starting shit. She’d known there was going to be trouble the second she saw how over-catered it was. Anything that involved throwing away large amounts of food made Steve kind of lose his mind.

“The fucked up thing.” She leaned against the wall. People had seen her drag him out, and tomorrow there were going to be unkind rumors about what they were getting up to now, here, but Eva felt like she hadn’t exhaled in almost five months and she was lightheaded from alcohol on a mostly empty stomach and it was hard to remember to care. “The fucked up thing is, when I think about it, issue by issue, I don’t think I disagree with anything you’ve said.”

Steve looked over at her slowly. “What,” he said.

Eva let herself slide down the wall until she was crouching on the scuffed tile in her stupid, too-expensive new dress. “Fuck the Boy Scouts,” she said. “The amount of open transphobia in our culture makes me sick. The, the income disparity in this country? It’s disgusting. And trust me, you don’t need to tell me about the racism baked into every level of the system.” Her shoes were pushing dents into her feet. She shucked them off.

When she opened her eyes again, Steve was sitting on the ground next to her. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” he said.

“Because it’s not what I do.” She stared bleakly forward. “It’s not my job to tell you I agree. It’s not my job to say I think you’re doing the right thing. It’s not my job to say that my friends and I used to run around at recess pretending to be the Howling Commandos and somehow you are still a better person than I was hoping for, somehow you’re exactly what this country—”

She was getting maudlin. She breathed in, breathed out. “My job,” she said, “is trying to convince vast numbers of people they like you. Or at least that they don’t hate you. My job is to take everything about you that makes me want to be a better person, and ignore it, hide it, or spin it into something else.”

“Just to state the obvious,” said Steve, “your job is pretty lousy.”

She laughed, a dry rattling in her chest. “Yeah,” she said, “but on the other hand, in three years I might be able to pay off all my student loans.”

“Why,” he said, with a very familiar intensity, “how much does college cost now?”

Eva moaned. “Don’t do this to me, Rogers. Please, for the love of God, don’t do this to me tonight.”

Steve tilted his head against the wall and said nothing for a long time. “Did you really pretend to be me on the playground?” he asked after a long moment. She’d witnessed him accept honorary medals with the dull toleration of a man waiting at the dentist’s office, but when he turned to look at her, he sounded awkwardly proud.

“Are you kidding? I was never popular enough to get to be you.” She wiggled her toes. “Sometimes they let me be your friend, that was pretty great. Sergeant Bucky Barnes,” she said. “Good times.”

“You got the better end of that deal,” said Steve. A corner of his mouth turned upwards, sad and tired but genuine in a way she’d never seen on him.

“Yeah? What was he like?” said Eva.

“God,” he laughed. “How long do you have?”

It was only ten or eleven; the party was going on for hours and the longer they talked, the less likely Steve was to alienate the leader of a major news network over a plate of caviar. “Pretty long time,” she said.

He smiled, looking for once like an actual 23-year-old. “So the first thing you need to know,” he said, “is that in addition to being my best friend, and one of the best guys I ever met, is that Bucky Barnes could be a real jerk—”

Steve spent the next two hours talking about Bucky, eyes distant, voice impossibly fond, laughing more in that night than she’d heard in five months. It was the best time Eva had ever had at one of these swanky gatherings, and definitely the best time she’d ever had with Steve.

In a perfect world, it would have led to some kind of breakthrough between them. What actually happened was that the next day, Steve called the Speaker of the House a fascist live on national television, and Eva learned how it felt to spontaneously develop an ulcer.





Then there was the thing with Bill O’Reilly. Eva woke up in a cold sweat every night thinking about the thing with Bill O’Reilly.





If anything, Steve had stepped up his game. In quieter moments she wondered if it was on purpose, if he’d picked up on how miserable she was, and on some level he was trying to force her out.

Mostly she thought it was giving that asshole too much credit.

She quit the day she realized she was starting to fantasize about working for Stark Industries.

Three months after Eva handed in her resignation, Steve casually came out as bisexual, in an unscheduled interview with a student newspaper from some tiny no-name college in the middle of Iowa. The question had been about voter turnout. His sexuality was just an aside he threw in there. You know. Off the cuff.

Eva had about ten seconds of a panic attack before the Hallelujah chorus of “No longer my problem!” set in.

She sent the new publicist a fruit basket and a sympathy card.