“Some people move on... but not us.”
I mentioned Steve’s inability to move on in an answer to an ask about the Steggy ending, and while I want to make clear that I think many criticisms of that ending have validity and that Steve and Bucky should have had an actual reunion and goodbye – for the MCU version of Steve Rogers (not 616!Steve; he’s a whole different bag of issues)– I think his choice to go back to reunite with Peggy makes sense in terms of his overall arc.
MCU!Steve Rogers doesn’t move on.
That’s sort of the thesis of his journey in Endgame (his trailer line “Some people move on, but not us” being hammered home), but it’s been built up throughout the series.
Peggy wasn’t just someone he “kissed once” – she was one of the few people in his life who saw the value in him back before he was Cap, looking at him as a person back in 1943 in boot camp. They bonded over being pushed to the margins and overlooked. She treated him like a human instead of a lab rat when he was selected for Project Rebirth. And after Erskine died and Steve was reduced to a dancing monkey, Peggy believed in him. She had his back and helped him go AWOL to rescue Bucky, she was working with him the whole time he and the howlies were laying waste to HYDRA in Europe. That’s nearly 2 years of knowing one another, before the ice.
Waking up in the 20th century is traumatizing for Steve. He goes down ready to die and survives, but loses his life all the same. His last words of CA:TFA, are “I had a date.” His whole existence and everyone he’s ever known is ripped away from him, and the distillation of that for him is his date with Peggy.
Then in CA:TWS, we see he’s been visiting Peggy. It’s presumably something he’s been doing for a while, even if she doesn’t remember. Steve flirts a little with Sharon, and he’s trying to let go and move on, but it’s obvious he hasn’t really been able to. He doesn’t date. He doesn’t really have much of a life outside of SHIELD, despite Natasha’s efforts. Then Bucky comes back, and Steve is once again confronted with the past. A past that doesn’t let him move on.
Except… Bucky does move on. Bucky leaves and goes to find himself and his memories over the next few couple without Steve. I know everyone and their aunt has fanfiction about Steve helping Bucky find himself, and I love those fics too, but in canon, Bucky goes it alone. He isn’t interested in having Steve on that journey. And when Steve chases after him, Bucky makes it clear he isn’t that man anymore. He might remember flashes of him, but too much has been done to him. Too much has changed. Steve is never getting back the Bucky from his past, however much he tries to treat him the same.
In AOU, Steve’s nightmare is that he can never go home. That he’s changed too much– that he’s too broken and too traumatized. He longs to go dance with Peggy, but he can’t. He tries to convince himself that he’s okay with letting go of that life he wanted. He says: “I don’t know. Family, stability… The guy who wanted all that went in the ice 75 years ago. I think someone else came out.” – He convinces himself it’s impossible, but it doesn’t feel like the triumph of moving forward. When Steve calls the Avengers compound home at the end, there’s a sorrow in it – a surrender. This is the only home Steve gets. The only one he’s allowed to have. He’s made peace with it, but he hasn’t embraced it, not the way Natasha has looked at it as her family and home.
Steve is a walking open wound, and while he’s staunched the bleeding, it’s never healed.
Steve longs for that past; for the man Bucky used to be; for the life after the war that he never got to live. He carries Peggy’s picture in his compass throughout the series, pulling it out over and over again like a talisman, and even in the modern day, keeps up with her until her death, where he is absolutely devastated. And Peggy carried the scars of that loss too, enough to leave weeping when she saw Steve and thought it was for the first time in seventy years, over and over again.
Steve loves Bucky, but he loves Peggy too. His time with both of them was stolen.
And Bucky wants to move on. Wants to be someone new. He can’t be that smiling guy from Brooklyn anymore, but he can reinvent himself, maybe, and heal.
That talisman – that compass – is the embodiment of Steve’s loss. In times of crisis, he always turns to Peggy’s face, frozen in time, a reminder of the man he was when she loved him and who he’s always tried to continue to be – the part of himself he’s tried to keep, instead of changing. He never throws it away to look forward. He carries it with him. Just like he carries every death, every grief from his past on his shoulders until the weight of it verges on the unbearable.
So while yes, it sucks that Steve’s other relationships are pushed to the wayside in that last scene and he absolutely should have had better goodbyes and more of a reunion and parting with Bucky – he’s lived the last five years of his life without Sam or Bucky, and his only meaningful and consistent relationship over those five years was Natasha, who is now dead. He now has the option to go back and be with Peggy, to rescue the version Bucky he lost, and to live out the life that he sacrificed. He has a chance to find peace – and as a soldier, peace is what he’s wanted.
Also, without Steve constantly wishing for Bucky to be the man he used to be, to follow him into some replica of the past, Bucky can move forward and be someone different – someone new.
It hurts, and it’s bittersweet. But it makes sense to me.
(And if you disagree – that’s fine! Everyone’s going to have a different analysis and a different emotional response as to whether the ending was personally satisfying or not. My only request is that you please, at the very least, don’t devalue Peggy as a character or her importance to Steve when expressing your dismay. She deserves better than that.)
