steve rogers (willingtopay) wrote in the100, @ 2016-01-25 08:23:00 |
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In those hazy moments between sleep and awake, it was easy to imagine he was somewhere else. Those were some of his favorite moments of the day, when the world was still and he could pretend he was anywhere but in the small, drafty apartment that he and Bucky could barely afford to keep up with. Sometimes he imagined a rock and a bedroll for a pillow and the clear night sky above him (not that he would be able to see the stars well, with his eyesight, but he could imagine they looked real nice, twinkling far away). This time, he felt warm all over, and like he was safe for the first time in years. As the fog dissipated, Steve began to notice more. He could feel the weight of another person beside him in the bed -- Bucky? He was pretty sure he would have noticed if Bucky crashed on him in the middle of the night. He closed his eyes tightly for a moment and then blinked a few times. The ceiling looked different, and the room was quiet. New York City was never quiet, not even in the dead of night. Slowly, he turned his head. The name of his best friend was about to escape his lips when he realized that there was a head full of blonde hair on the pillow next to him. Confused and more than a little surprised, he scrambled out of bed, tripping over himself as his feet got caught in the covers. He didn’t remember going to bed with anyone recently, let alone a woman. His breath left him all at once. What was going on? Who was she? The chill of the room made him shiver, and Steve finally looked down at himself, only to find a bare expanse of skin and nothing else. ... Oh. That explained why he was cold. He turned away from the bed, scanning the room for something -- anything -- to wear. Something that wasn’t the blanket, because it wouldn’t have been right to take that from the woman in bed. The blonde woman shifted when Steve moved, stretching her arms above her head and yawning broadly. The blanket slipped down and gave Steve a full view of her breasts before she rolled over and groped out blindly at the space that Steve had been occupying just moments before. "Hey?" She patted the mattress, then blearily lifted her head to look at him -- and she stared, as if she'd never seen him before. "Holy -- holy shit," she blurted out. "Steve?!" The voice from the bed drew Steve's attention back to it, and to her, whoever she was. It also meant he got an eyeful of -- no, Steve told himself as he tore his gaze away quickly, you're not going to disrespect her like that. "I -- I'm sorry, miss, I…" He stammered, feeling his blush spread across his cheeks to his ears and down his neck. "I don't mean to -- I mean, I didn't --" He wasn't great at talking to women in general, let alone like this. Where was he supposed to look? He looked up at the ceiling and tried to inhale deeply, but his breath was shaky and shallow. The mention of his name surprised him. Did he get so drunk that he forgot who she was? Instead of admitting that he had no idea who she was, Steve tried something else: "where are we?" The woman was staring at him curiously, clutching the blanket to her body for modesty's sake and starting to smile. "Hey," she said, reaching out her hand. "You're freaking out. Sit down, okay?" She scooted over to make room for Steve. "And if you wanna bring me that shirt over there, you can do that." She was right. He was freaking out. If he couldn't get ahold of his nerves, he'd scare himself into an asthma attack, and God only knew what he'd do about that here, wherever here was. Steve looked back at her helplessly, careful to look directly at her face, and then he nodded. “Okay.” He could do that. One step at a time. If he had something to focus on, besides not knowing what had happened, that would help. His eyes scanned the floor again and he found a pair of pants, which he tugged up quickly. They were too big, but at least there was a string at the waist. He gave the shirt to her before sitting on the edge of the bed. Steve still felt like an intruder, but she was being kind, and he didn't want to seem ungrateful. “You didn't answer my question.” The woman tugged the shirt on. She couldn't stop looking at him, her eyes scanning over his body with what looked like fascination. "Uh, so." She turned away and groped on the nightstand for an elastic hair tie. "This is Mount Weather. You've been living here for the last … nine months or so, but you probably don't remember it," she said, gathering up her hair in a messy, tangled ponytail and securing it. "Sometimes, stuff like this happens. Magic runs rampant, or something's messing with us, I don't know. You, um. It looks like you got younger," she said, and then her expression turned to worry. "You're you. You have to be you, this'll go back some time soon, this has to just be some kind of freak thing…" Steve couldn't say that a woman had ever looked at him the way this woman was. Typically, their gazes would settle on him for a fraction of a second and then move to Bucky, and then he'd see their faces lit up with a variety of emotions. He wasn't given disdain, or disgust; the worst things were apathy and pity. On a good day, he just wasn't there at all. Not until he or Bucky spoke up and forced people to recognize his existence. Sometimes Steve did that himself. Other times, it was Bucky refusing to let his best friend be left behind. This was different, though. She looked curious and then confused. Steve blushed under her scrutiny, but at least he was worth enough to her for her to be concerned. "Nine months?" Steve frowned. How could he have been there for nine months when he'd been living in Brooklyn for the last nine months? "How --" He was going to ask her how it was possible, but he suspected she didn't know either. And now she was starting to sound upset. "I feel the same as I did yesterday." Magic? How could some stage tricks make him younger? Steve didn't understand that. "Of course I'm still me." He said it like there should be no question in the first place. Of course he was himself. "Are we…" He exhaled slowly. He didn't need to ask that, did he? They'd woken up without any clothes. They were something. "I don't mean to upset you. I just… I don't understand what's going on here. One minute I'm in New York, and the next I'm here, and while I'm real grateful that I did something to deserve a chance with someone like you, I… I don't remember. I'm sorry. I wish I did." The woman smiled gently, reaching out to touch Steve's cheek. "I'm not pissed at you, soldier, I'm okay," she said. She didn't seem completely okay. She took a deep breath, steadying herself. "Okay! So, uh. Hi, I'm Carol. I'm your girlfriend? In the future. I'm your future girlfriend." She grinned, in an attempt to look impressive. Were you impressed, Steve? "And you… are… wow. You're tiny. And. Wow. Uh. What year is it? I mean, what's the last thing you remember?" Girlfriend. Steve was impressed. Surprised, but impressed. Even if something about the way she called him tiny felt weird. He knew he was short, and he knew he was skinny. Shouldn't she know that too? He sat up a little straighter (as much as he could, anyway), almost defiant and proud. It wasn't like he could exactly help how he looked. "It's 1943. Buck and I, ah, we went to the World Expo." Bucky was shipping out the next day. They were on a double date, and his didn't give two hoots about him. And here he had a girlfriend. That was bad form in any world, he was pretty sure. He studied her carefully for a moment. "How are you my girlfriend? I didn't -- I've never had a girlfriend. No matter how hard Bucky tries to set me up with dames, it never works." Carol's mouth twitched and she was trying desperately not to smile. Dames. "Looks like Bucky's just not hooking you up with the right dames," she said. "I… uh." She blushed, looking down at her hands. "So, this is gonna freak you out," she said. "And there's no good way to get around it, so we're just gonna pull it off like a Band-Aid. It's 2151, and you're not always this skinny." She reached out and gave his arm a little squeeze. "I don't hate it, though." That was an understatement if Steve ever heard one. Bucky probably had no idea where to find girls like Carol, who'd actually date him. Steve had no idea where they were. In the future, it seemed. "So…" Between what Carol was saying and her hand on his arm, Steve thought his heart might jump out of his chest. She was right: he was freaking out, but there was something comforting about her presence that made it all a little easier. She looked about as uncomfortable as he felt. He cleared his throat. "It's the future." Flying cars were barely in the realm of something Steve thought possible, let alone time travel. Or anything else. He looked at her, a little skeptical. "What do I look like, then, if not…" He gestured at himself, unable to find the right word to describe it. She could see for herself, though. She'd seen everything already. "Docs said I was done growin', didn't think I could put on any weight even if I tried. And believe me, I try. As much as I can afford to, I mean." Carol scrunched her nose and hesitated, like she wasn't sure how much she wanted to tell him. "Well, uh." She scooted on the mattress so she could sit beside him instead of in front of him, sitting cross-legged and shoving the hem of her shirt down between her legs to make sure it covered everything. "You kept trying to join the army, right? But they wouldn't take you? Well, someone took you." Very carefully, Steve watched her face. Not her legs, although they were very nice, and long, and -- Steve swallowed and blinked. Gosh, future-him was a lucky man. All of this should have sounded suspicious. It had, honestly. Steve thought he was a good judge of character, but that wasn't quite enough to overrule the sheer insanity of what she was telling him. Up until Carol mentioned that he'd been trying to join the Army, at least. He knew that what he was doing was very, very illegal. If she knew about it, she must have been the real deal. Slowly, he nodded. "Who took me? I thought I'd burned all those chances." "They liked your pluck," Carol said with a little smirk. She didn't know all of the details, but she did her best to piece together what she knew. "They thought you'd be a good candidate for an experimental program. They didn't know you were ideal until they brought you to basic training and they threw a dummy grenade out into your squad. Everyone else jumped back, but you … jumped on it, to save everyone else." Peggy had told her that, and Carol couldn't shake it. It was why Steve was special. Did Steve understand he was special, sitting here like this? His pluck. Steve grinned at that. Most people he knew would've called it something else -- stupidity, probably. Even Bucky said that, though he said it in a much nicer way, one that told Steve he was kind of amused by Steve's tricks. Their lives would be boring if not for his antics, after all. "We didn't know it was a dummy, did we?" Steve guessed not; why bother throwing it if everyone knew it was a dud? He considered the situation future-him would find himself in: basic training, following orders, not knowing it was a dummy grenade. Of course his first instinct would be to save everyone, not hide. That was the whole reason he wanted to fight. He didn't want to hide anymore. He shrugged a little. "Yeah, all right. Sounds like somethin' I'd do. Run head first into a fight instead of away from it. And I told ya all of that?" "Friend of yours did," said Carol. She tugged at her ponytail to tighten it. "They liked what they saw, they wanted someone with a good heart and a good spirit above anything else, and they … uh. Well, they took care of the part where you're sick and frail, and made you not sick and frail." She smiled, all clenched teeth. It was a hard thing for anyone to swallow if this wasn't normal for them. For a moment, Steve wondered why it was a friend who told her, and not himself, but he had no idea what his future self was thinking. He had no idea why he'd sign up for that, either, except that he had no other options if he wanted to make a real difference. And he had no idea how someone could fix everything that was wrong with him. He knew what an uphill climb that would be. The fact that someone had would have been a miracle. “So, I'm…” Steve frowned a little, trying to sort out everything Carol was telling him. She was dating some version of himself that was different than he was right now: not so skinny and small, not weak and sick all the time. As overwhelming as it was for him to take in, it must have been for her, too. He shivered. It was cold in the room - or he was just cold. “This must be hard for you. Waking up with…” He winced, feeling bad for that. Even though it wasn't his fault, he felt bad. He smoothed his hands on his thighs. “I can ask my questions later, it's okay. I'm resilient. I can handle all this.” The last two sentences were for his own benefit than hers, truthfully. Steve could adapt. He always had. Carol noticed the shiver, and she grabbed the blanket in order to wrap it around Steve's shoulders. "It's not as hard for me as you think it is," she said with a quick, forced smile. It wasn't her ideal way of waking up, but she just had to hope that this was happening elsewhere in the compound and wasn't just about Steve. She nudged him with her elbow. "Lucky for us, I'm pretty resilient, too. So we can both handle all of this." |