tell me again about how peggy carter never taught steve rogers how to fight?
you
clearly
aren’t
paying
enough
attention
dear
What I love about this in an odd way is that all of these fighting techniques tend to be used by smaller and weaker people. In the first two: you get them off balance, take them by surprise. In three and four: incapacitating someone so they can’t continue to harm you. Five and six: again, surprise and using nearby objects because if they can’t get to you, they can’t hit you. Finally, the last two: overturn their center of gravity, get them off balance, get them to fall. These are all things Steve should have been taught before he went standing up to bullies and they are all things that Peggy Carter made sure he knew when he was big enough to keep bullies from hurting other people.
She taught Steve before he was big. She didn’t know (and if she had an idea, she definitely didn’t know for certain) that he was ever going to get big. She taught little Steve Rogers how to fight, because everyone else at basic training treated his presence like a joke, and because she was hands down the most qualified.
Or course Steve already knew how to fight, but he knew how to fight like a big muscular person, which he wasn’t. Most of his knowledge of fighting came from being hit by other people, by bigger people, by men. You can bet Bucky tried to teach him, but Bucky was big and strong and not qualified to know what would work best for STEVE.
Peggy Carter taught Steve to fight within his abilities, within his limitations, USING his size to his advantage. Be fast, be resourceful, bend your knees and get low and use their momentum against them, and when it gets serious fight dirty.
Peggy Carter taught Steve Rogers to fight like a woman, and that is why he always fucking wins.
okay but imagine IMAGINE a criminal organization like aim or hydra capturing the avengers and steve is brought before the commander idiot-in-charge and ofc this dude is prattling on about how the avengers are done for, how thor has been trapped in another realm and bruce banner is tranquilized and black widow and hawkeye are contained and he’s like “and your precious tony stark is working for us now, building a new age of weapons technology right in our labs”
and steve, who is tied to a chair btw, just starts CRACKING. UP. for a full minute. so much that tears are rolling down his cheeks and the chair and bonds are straining under his weight and movement and steve just can’t stop laughing and the commander dude yells “WHAT’S SO FUNNY” because steve has literally been laughing for 60 seconds and his minions are looking at him nervously
steve is like “you don’t know much about tony stark do you?” and goes into another fit of laughter.
another 60 seconds later, an explosion rocks the evil HQ building, shoot to thrill starts playing in the distance
Steve’s introduction to social media started off as Tony’s idea of a joke. After he’d been out of the ice for a few months, Steve was irritatingly well-adjusted, and Tony couldn’t resist pushing a few buttons. So, one day, Steve got a message on his S.H.I.E.L.D. email (“Email!? You understand email?” “Of course. It’s just like a telegram on a screen.”) with a link to a site called tumblr. The post he’d been directed to is part of a blog apparently run by a history major looking for a place to scream about WWII. Some of the post made reference to books and documentaries that he didn’t know about, though he supposes they must be rather popular since she never goes into great detail. However, from what he was able to parse, the author was insinuating that perhaps he and Bucky had been a bit more than childhood pals. (The exact wording being: “I’ve seen the old reels, and let me tell you; that is not a smile you give your buddy. Barnes and Rogers were the gal pals of the twentieth century, okay?”)
He blushes and makes a mental note to get Stark back later, but…his interest is piqued. This girl has really done her work. It’s actually a little alarming how accurately a total stranger has pegged him, but in the same breath, it’s sort of nice. Even after the serum, nobody seemed all that interested in Steve Rogers. Other than Bucky and Peggy, it was all about Captain America, and after his “death” he became a symbol, warped and tainted by the years until he didn’t resemble himself anymore. But as he scrolled down through more posts, it was clear that whoever was behind this blog knew who Steve Rogers was, or was at least making an effort to figure it out.
Two hours later, he had six tabs open and was buried deep in the Captain America tag, alternating between enraged and delighted as he read through the debates about everything from his political leanings to his mental health. He desperately wanted to respond. Both to set a few records straight and to thank the dedicated historians that looked at the man behind the shield.
“Natasha,” he called across the common room.
“Hmm?” she looked up from her book and raised an eyebrow.
“Can you help me with something?” The look on her face as she strode over was one he’d grown accustomed to since his de-icing. It was the one that said “Be nice to grandpa, he doesn’t know any better.” Clearly, she was expecting to explain how to run a Google search or something equally self-explanatory, but instead, he asked: “How do I reply to this?” and pointed at one of the posts.
“Oh. Um…for starters, open a new tab.” She walked him through the process and a few minutes later, steve-g-rogers was up and running. Natasha helped him post a picture of himself waving hello into the webcam with a little bio beneath it, and explained how to tag it so that people would see.
It exploded overnight, hundreds and then thousands of followers accumulating as bloggers found out that it was the real Captain America debunking their research. He stayed up into the early morning, correcting the most blatantly wrong posts and answering piles of questions, some about how he was getting by in the future and “dude, you know tumblr?” mixed in with some serious ones about what life was really like in the thirties and forties. Finally, he reached out and messaged the blogger that had sparked his interest, confiding she had hit pretty close to the truth, and “Please don’t publish this, I need to gather my wits a bit more before I’m ready to put it out there, but yes. There was more. For me, at least, it was more. And thank you. Not many people seem to remember that I’m a person before I’m a symbol.”
From there, Steve’s internet exploration took off. As he branched out more on tumblr, he found himself taking up art again, posting pictures of cartoons he drew in staff meetings or sketches of the other Avengers. Even a few of Bucky that he did from memory. Eventually, there were so many that he made an instagram account, where he also started posting photos of the New York skyline as seen from Stark Tower. The caption on the first one read: “Ugly building, beautiful view.” Once he feels caught up enough on political issues to weigh in, he sets up a twitter. He completely forgoes the usual “Hello, this is my first tweet” route and opens with: “@GOP: FDR’s New Deal “handouts” saved half my neighborhood. #Captain America is not your conservative puppet.” The media goes nuts.
