magibrain

I'm going to be amazed if this doesn't contradict something in one of the canons.

Also, this is more "Steve starts looking at history" and less about the Eastern front and Russia specifically, but that's what you get.

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"I'm Russian," she said. "Thankfully, I'm free of those

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Steve let out a short, not really amused laugh. "That wasn't in the history I read."

"Because it was an American history, probably," Natasha said.

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because the history of the war he was interested in had been the history of his people, their singular lives. Beyond that – they'd won the war, Europe was free, and the world today hardly gave the war a second thought. He was trying to stay afloat here. Every page he read just threatened to drag him down under.

There was something about watching the lives of everyone you'd known reduced to marks of ink on textbook paper that made you disinclined to read too widely.

And besides, there had been other things clamoring for his attention.

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"Of the two of us, I was the one who was there."

"Mm," Natasha said, not sounding the least part impressed. "Sure. So regale me with your extensive firsthand knowledge. Got any good stories about the Blitz? How about Leningrad?"

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"That's the one thing history is good for," Natasha said, with a shrug. "You can see the whole picture. You can tell what went wrong, if you feel like learning from it. Like, maybe it would have done Russia some good not to purge its army before the war kicked off. That was a lesson America failed to learn. You're just lucky there wasn't another Great War after the fifties. Just a cold one."

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Atomic weapons, even with what we know today, can be cheap. Even with what we know how to do today without any of the new things, the little things and the radical things, atomic armament will not break the back of any people that want atomic armament.

He paused, and moved the bookmark under the last line of text.

While he'd been burying one doomsday device beneath the ice, another had been taking shape on the mesas of America's own backyard.

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The war he'd been fighting had swallowed the whole of his world. But the war he'd been fighting hadn't been the whole of the war.

And really, he'd never expected that it would be. It was a bigger thing than him; he'd known that. But somehow it hadn't come to him that the far-flung corners of the war could be so very alien to the mud and the blood and the western European sky, the bullets and the rations and the hard-beating hearts

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from that history and of it, but grasping so little of it. Like a mountain or an ocean which could only really be seen with great distance.

Otherwise, it was just the rocks and the water.

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