therighttime | AU Milliways

Fond enough to melt the bitterness away. Steph grins back at him, laughs quietly along with the man across from her, one hand pressed to her own cheek. "Hodge, yes, he was terrible at me, too. That swing just-"

caught her eye, made Carter shine, made Steph's heart pound

She stops herself, grins, tucks her hair behind her ear and privately curses fair skin. "It was a great hit, that's all."

The little piece of charcoal is settled down beside the line of Bucky's index finger and Steph lets her eyes wander over the drawings made from Steve's hands.

In among the mass of drawings he's done of the future, there are some he's done from memory. The old neighborhood. A baseball player at bat. His mother's hands. A woman in a red dress. Almond eyes.

He shifts a little in his seat to get comfortable, somewhere in the last few seconds letting his gaze drop with Steph's. He's good at reading a situation, reading people (even when he's terrible at understanding women), and there's something about Steph that makes him think it being a great hit isn't all for her. Like it wasn't all for him, either. She's drawing Bucky's hands, she's lighting up when they talk about Peggy, and it strikes him like a bean ball that the important people in his life are the important people in hers, too. Not that he didn't realize that before, but ... Bucky is his best friend, and Peggy is, well. Peggy.

He squeegees his index finger along the lip of his liqueur glass, and looks at Steph. Maybe Bucky ... maybe Bucky's her best guy, and she's closer friends with Peggy than she makes out like she is. Or maybe ... hell, it could be the other way around. Or maybe it's exactly like Steph says it is, and he's reading too much into things because of what? Nostalgia? Hubris? Or maybe that seed of jealousy he's trying to pretend isn't there, because somewhere out there Bucky and Peggy are just how he left them.

"Yeah. If Hodge had the guts to treat Peggy the way he did, I figure he could be pretty vicious to a lady private. Especially one going for the same assignment." He wets his bottom lip, and smiles crookedly. "I hope you gave him what for if he raised a stink."

Steph laughs, soft, and shakes her head, eyes still roving over his drawings. "Not like Agent Carter did, that's for sure. I'd've loved to, but I was still pretty small at the time."

She pauses, smile soft in pride for the memories - tricks and subterfuge and blackmail when she lacked the necessary muscle.

It fades a little when she catches sight of the hands he's drawn.

Her own hand is large, palm square, but proportionally speaking, the fingers are still long and elegant. Yet Stephanie recognizes her own mother's hands immediately, the gentle strength and comforting warmth she remembers.

It takes her breath away at first, makes her forget Hodge entirely. Bucky and Peggy are in this man's past. It's overwhelming to look at those hands, hands no one else in the world would know well enough to sketch from memory, and realize even that does not belong only to her anymore.

A knowing smile is all the answer he gives to her comment. Steve wouldn't trade his new body back in -- after all, it's because of it he's been able to serve his country the way he has, it's because of Dr. Erskine's faith that he got a chance -- but he misses being small sometimes.

Not getting beat up in alleys. Not getting picked last for dodgeball. But because it was his, and he was comfortable with it, and no matter what the docs said there wasn't anything really wrong with it. His hands were more like his mother's before the serum. He still had his wits to rely on, and his wits were enough.

For a while.

He catches the change in her body language and follows the slant of her eyes. For a second, the hands take his breath away, too. He's already looked at them a million times, but now he's seeing them through her eyes. "Sorry. I should, uh. Probably straighten all these up."

He makes a stack on one side of the table, and runs his hand through his hair. "It's weird, isn't it? Us talking."

She almost protests when he takes them away and is struck by- yes, the weirdness of it. That she would ask for a longer look at a beautiful drawing of her mother's hands, when she's perfectly capable of making a duplicate.

When she'd sat at the table, she'd praised his skill. Something about that wars in her now, feels more like a brag than a compliment, even though she didn't draw them, even though nothing says they draw the same or with equal skill, but...

Steph's really a bit grateful when Steve speaks again and interrupts that line of thought.

"Guess so," she agrees, nodding. A hand lifts - but she catches his movement first, stops herself from touching her hair and curls her hand over her shoulder instead. "I don't really know what we should be talking about. Or shouldn't be."

He catches the movement out of the corner of his eye, instinctively knowing she was about to mimic his own gesture. Except it's not exactly mimicking when you're the same person, it's -- jeepers, it's just being yourself. His hand has stilled, but he stubbornly carries on like he hasn't noticed anything at all, because if they can't be themselves then ... well, what then?

"Should or shouldn't be are the questions I leave up to my superior officers, Captain. If we're ... who we are, family, whatever, then there aren't any secrets we can really keep from each other. Are there?" he says, like he's just thinking out loud. In a weird way, he sort of is. "Not that I'm digging for classified information. Just that ... "

That what?

He clenches his jaw, and lets out a slow breath. "I don't want to make you uncomfortable."

Make us uncomfortable.

Steph doesn't say that. Just thinks it. Looking quietly at the large, gentle man across from her, listening to him trip over his words, struggle with the thoughts and ideas she's struggling with.

What she finds herself saying instead is, "Call me Steph." Flashing a smile, feeling it settle on her lips, outside of the stage and show. "Please.

"I respect the chain of command. I just don't know how much of it counts here, with you already knowing so much that's already classified to me."

Yeah. Make us uncomfortable. He's thinking it, too.

It's a relief when she insists on her first name and flashes him a smile. Maybe for the first time tonight he lets himself relax, and eases into a smile of his own. "Call me Steve."

His hands flick, too subtle to be the old neighborhood gestures used by the Italians and the Jews, too low to the table, too brief, but probably learned from them all the same. Why not? is what they say. Not like there's any reason to stand on formality.

"Why don't we talk about something other than our current missions, then? Like, uh ... How did you find this place? How long have you been coming here?"

The set of her shoulders eases a little with his smile, relaxing out of perfect posture in her chair. He looks a little more real like that, a real person listening to her instead of a Captain or specifically a fella.

He gestures and she mimics the movement in an even briefer motion, in agreement of his meaning. But it takes a moment, a blink, for her to register what they've both done, why they've done.

Her shoulders come down even more, her smile set deep enough to nearly show a dimple. How long's it been since someone said anything with their hands and wasn't laughed at for showing off their borough? Before she went on tour with a bunch of girls from all over the country, that's for sure.

"Brand new, actually," Steph admits, letting the hand on her shoulder curl into her hair, fingers wrapped around a flattening curl of gold. "Just stepped in this morning, one bar to the next. And you?"

Steph isn't anything like the USO girls, and Steve's rather glad about that. Not that they weren't ... nice. That is, they had really nice attributes. And he means more than just the outfits that showed off their great curves and shapely gams, because he still can't admire a woman without turning pink and feeling the need to apologize for himself. Steph's from the neighborhood, like Peggy. Despite Steve's ability to be a complete heel in the company of remarkable women, it's inescapably comforting.

He bobs his head. "It's only been a few months for me. I thought it was, uh. Normal." That one's hard to explain without getting into the seventy-year nap that landed him in the future. "Part of my new station. Guess that tells you something, huh?"

His lips screw up in a hapless grin. He watches her muss her curls. Even that is strangely comforting, but for different reasons. "I was walking through a revolving door, and suddenly: bar."

"Normal, huh?" Steph echoes, and looks over at the bar, teeming with all sorts of folks, all sorts of clothing and unfamiliar items strewn everywhere.

A waitrat passes and chirps cheerfully at them both. Steph quirks a smile and waves.

When she looks at Steve again, it's with a grin. "Sounds like life just gets more and more interesting for you."

He's amused. It's not the flash of perfectly straight white teeth and crinkled eyes of earlier, caught in a laugh over a great memory, but something distinctly more intimate. That slightly crooked, slightly deprecating cock of his mouth, the way his eyebrows arch, his head tilts.

"Uh, yeah," he chuffs. "I don't think of this place as normal, I think of my assignment as really, really weird. It's, uh. Someplace we've never been. Or I've never been, anyway. It's almost like another world."

He shrugs, nodding toward the Window. It's not on the level of The End of the Universe; this genuinely is another world, far away from the Brooklyn of nineteen-thirty-nine. "Decent assignment, though. Still fighting for freedom. Uh, sometimes it's nice to take off the cowl and wear a pair of sneakers, though. Nobody here looks at Captain America twice."

Steph smiles back. Mouth closed and lips quirked, the crinkling of her eyes showing true amusement, but far from nostalgic laughter. His explanation is perfectly vague but Steph can see the wisdom in that, and no reason to push.

Someplace we've never been. 'Almost like another world' sums up how she felt running through the Italian forest while bombs were dropped around her, not a street lamp in sight. Not even Central Park ever got that dark.

She follows his gaze to the window but doesn't really look at it. Glad that in her future, even a strange possibly unlikely future, there are decent assignments. Glad that Steve smiles when he talks about his life.

Nobody here looks at Captain America twice.

Steve is a handsome man. Stephanie thinks about that for a moment while planets explode before her eyes.

"What's your uniform look like?" she blurts - and there's a flutter of her hands, pink staining her cheeks as her brain catches up with her mouth. That flutter of hands might have been to snatch the words out of the air as much as just politely covering her mouth.

"I'm sorry, I just meant - it made sense in my head, really."

Edited 2013-10-10 21:06 (UTC)

His attention snaps back to her, but he doesn't look alarmed. Just curious.

"No, it's okay. It's ... I mean, you know what it's like to wear it," he says, waving his hand to make up for the words he can't quite put in order. A you get it, you understand, it's not really prying when you've been there. He doesn't know Steph, but then he knows her far too well. His normal discomfort with the pomp and circumstance of his given title, his stage name, isn't present. "It's, um. Well, it's a kind of rubber, I guess. And like a ... spandex." He breathes a laugh, and rubs the back of his head. "I've got a star on my chest, it's all red, white, and blue. Belt, shield."

Coming from 21st century New York, anything less than constant attention feels like anonymity. He might be exaggerating when he says no one here recognizes him, but nobody's calling him on the phone looking for interviews, following him up and down the street with cameras, asking for autographs ... well, there was that one time. And when it comes to the attention he gets from the ladies ... that's still all over strange.

Steph is still red in the face, mortified more by the rudeness of her phrasing than the question itself. Her hand stays up, palm against her chin and fingertips at her lips, listening to what he says. She listens to the description and her response might be a little strange.

She blinks and looks at him, frowning thoughtfully. Rubber and spandex?

"So it's..."

There's really no way to ask this politely.

She hesitates for a moment, then folds her hands on top of the table between them, hesitant. "I kind of feel like if we're going to talk about the uniform," Steph begins, quiet, "I should really buy you more schnapps."

He barks with laughter, and it sort of ... feels good. It feels lighter than he's felt in months.

"Good idea," he says with a bob of his head, waving over the waitrat that walked past a few moments ago. "I've got a feeling if I ask you the same question, you're going to want some alcohol in your system -- oh, hey, could we have two more of these?"

The last sentence is directed at the rat as Steve picks up the empty shot glass. Its whiskers twitch, and then it chitters affirmatively and takes their empty glasses.

Steph startles at the laughter, not expecting it, but her expression blooms into a wide grin, laughing along with him. It had been a serious point, a conversation neither of them would enjoy, a gift she should offer for the trouble.

But he's right, too. Even if the schnapps won't do anything to either of them, it's the feel of the thing.

And the excuse to cackle a little about something so profoundly ridiculous.

"Oh gosh," Steph sighs, still giggling, running a hand over her jaw. "Today's gonna be pretty great."

"You've been waiting a long time for these Schnapps, huh?" he says, not getting the gist of her remark.

She laughs again, shaking her head. Blue eyes sparkle as she grins up at him. "No, not really. Haven't really thought much about it, not since the doctor."

Steph drops her gaze to the papers and pencils on the table between them, struck again by Steve's skill. "I just think it'll be kinda nice to talk to someone who gets it, you know?"

The rest of his amusement softens into something else completely. Mutual understanding, respect, the freedom to go with his guard down (it's always subconsciously up when he's talking to a pretty woman, a stranger, someone who could just as easily trip him and laugh when he hits the dirt; it's been up almost perpetually since the plane crash, but right now he feels calm) -- whatever you want to call it, one thing's clear. He knows.

"Yeah. Uh, yeah, I do." He rubs the back of his head, somewhat bashful this time. "There's not a lot of people who can really understand what it's like to be -- us."

There's an 'us' now. Steve swallows, but before he can say anything embarrassing the waitrat comes back with their refills. Maybe somebody out there likes him after all.

Steph's looking up all the same, a little wondering. Not worrying too much about his embarrassment, understanding the awkwardness. And appreciating his willingness to speak enough to lean across the table, hand outstretched.

It's odd.

Not how her fingers look over the back of his hand. Not the faint heat of his skin against her fingertips. Not the fact she just made a familiar touch on a man she barely knows.

How tangible it is. He is. A real person, alive under the lightest touch of her hand, who draws her mother's hands and has stories about her neighborhood friend, who's familiar enough with Agent Carter to ask after her, who wears red, white, and blue spandex.

She touches the hand he hasn't got rubbing against the back of his head because he's not like one of the men who lust or stare after her, he's got no reason to be bashful.

"Yeah," Steph says, quiet, a little amazed by the last ten minutes spent at this little table in a busy bar worlds away from home.

"Yeah, us."

Sometimes, not often, these moments of revelation occur when everything that had been floating around without thought snap into place. Like the forming of the universe. The day God turned on the lights. For Steve, the last time happened when Heinz Kruger bit down on the suicide cap and Steve stood, barely tired from a foot chase that took him through half of New York, and looked at his new body.

But it's just happened again.

He looks at Steph's hand, then her eyes. That pensive line that usually betrays skepticism is between his brows, but this time he's just wrapping his head around everything. It's the five stages of realizing you're not alone in the universe: surprise, denial, weirdness, uncomfortableness, and now this. He reaches down with his other hand to cover Steph's, keeping it there.

"Are you hungry?" he says, for lack of knowing any better way to start than just asking; "Do you want to have dinner?"

Any excuse to stay, any excuse to keep talking.

The smile blooms over Steph's lips like an early morning flower to the sun, slow and smooth and utterly natural. Not about the meal, though she can pretty much always eat, wasn't raised to say no to available food. Just that he asked, that he gave her that courtesy even when she broke polite boundaries first, her fingertips still resting on his hand.

His over hers.

She looks down and smiles a little more at how Steve's hand covers hers but doesn't quite dwarf it. She imagines he doesn't see many hands that come close to his size. Steph's might be slender, but she's got larger hands than most of her men.

She beams up at him, curling fingers into more of a hold over his hand, not just a touch, and nods. "Dinner would be great."

Steve smiles at her, the kind of smile his mother used to say reminded her of his father's, the kind he'd shoot Bucky after he'd done something particularly stupid and crazy and exciting, because his best friend was invincible and always there for him.

"Great," he repeats, meaning every letter, every sound. For the first time in a long, long time, something really was great. "Hey, do you remember Luigi's? Best pie in Brooklyn." By 'pie' he means pizza, of course. "You won't believe me until you see for yourself, but this place makes a pie just as good as Luigi's."

He's willing to bet it's been a long time since Steph has come anywhere close to a pizza.

"You're right," Steph replies, laughing a little, caught up in his excitement and the way he smiles, similar to the grin she's flashing back at him. "I don't believe you. But I'll try a slice before I sully your name 'round the bar."

AU Milliways

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