Sara was tired, but she was doing her best not to show it. It had only been a few days since the Vultures, and while she had been healed enough to fight in the raid on the Salt Mines, she was still sore, exhausted, and with the reports and phone calls needed to follow up on the events, mentally drained. But she wasn’t dealing with it all on her own, and for that she was grateful.
She was supposed to be meeting Steve in the Cortex of STAR Labs in the next few minutes. On her way there she’d stopped off in the Lounge to pour espresso down her throat and take more with her so she didn’t attempt to take a nap in one of the chairs.
The Cortex wasn’t quiet when she arrived, luckily. There were a few scientists running around, talking about something that was up on the screens. Sara was pretty sure she heard one of them say Vultures, but if it was something she needed to know about she’d be told eventually. They paused briefly when she came in, but quickly returned to their work and acted as if she wasn’t there. Sara dropped down into one of the free chairs to wait for Steve to arrive.
Steve peeled off the lab coat he'd been wearing while discussing things with the STAR scientists (as he'd felt it was important to follow their safety protocols while standing around their equipment) after he'd seen Sara stroll in. "Thanks, Doctor Sterne, I'll leave you to your work. I appreciate the explanations."
With a nod, he handed over the loaned coat and walked over to drop into a chair next to Sara. "You know, enough people tell me that it's okay to take breaks and rest that I feel I'm allowed to pass that same advice onto you, Commander."
Sara nearly spun in her chair when she heard Steve’s voice coming from somewhere already in the room behind her. She must have been more tired than she though because how had she not noticed him?
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead again.” she responded with a shrug and a smile. “Or whenever the caffeine stops working today, whatever comes first.” The point was, she wasn’t quite ready to call it quits for the day just yet. “I’ll be fine.” She was conditioned to take worse than this. “Though I might leave early today because I absolutely did not realize you were here.”
Steve offered a soft smile and shrugged with his hands. "I was always told if you're not early, you're late. I've been asking the doctors here to tell me about their findings on the Vultures while I waited. Maybe it was the lab coat. Natasha taught me the value of blending in." Years later and he still couldn't recall the sudden kiss on the escalator without flushing a bit.
"Moving might help more than the caffeine. Walk and talk?" he asked, waiting for her to stand up first. You can take the man out of the 40s, but you can't take the 40s out of the man.
Sara glanced back at the scientists who had their head together with their work. “Should I expect anything interesting to come my way?” She kind of hoped the answer was no, dealing with the attacks had been interesting enough.
“Sure.” she agreed with a nod. She took another drink from her mug and got to her feet. At this point she was used to behavior that was different from her own time. “Usually I’m better at noticing when people are trying to blend in. Especially when I actually know them.” she wasn’t too concerned about it though, in this situation it wasn’t the end of the world. Once Steve was up, she headed out of the doors and into the hallways.
Staying in step with Sara, Steve shook his head. "Nothing just yet, but it's just another day in Vallo. Don't hold me to confirmation that things will be fine tomorrow. The Vulture situation seems to be resolved, at the very least." He decided to let the observation issue drop, maybe she was just more tired than she was letting on.
"We had a lot of injuries, but thankfully no casualties. As long as that luck keeps holding out, I'll keep a smile on my face. I was thinking of doing a round through the clinics to check up on our people, thank them again for all they do. But I don't want to overstep. Might be able to keep up the fun in our next training event to keep morale up?"
Sara had lost a lot of people over the years, as she was sure Steve had, too. The idea of it happening here caused her stomach to drop. So far, they had been lucky. With the amount of powerful healers on hand, hopefully they’d continue to be lucky. “I’m sure some of them wouldn’t mind the company. I’ve been trying to drop in, get them things if they need it. But different faces can make for better distractions.”
At the mention of the next training event she smiled. “We’ve been planning summer training for months. People might actually start to hate us, it’s going to be great.” Or at least she thought so. “But yes, we fully plan to keep the big training events more focused on building teamwork making it more fun.”
She pointed to one of the doors coming up on the right. “I need to stop by here for a second. I’d dropped some tech off to get worked on, it should be done by now.”
Dutifully, Steve stepped forward to open the door for her and stepped aside to let her enter first. "I'll start drafting up some ideas for teamwork events and send them over to you and Shiro for review. Immediate suggestions are avoiding anything avian."
“I’m starting to take offense to this avian pattern. I’m going to have to change my codename soon.” Turning from Steve, she walked through the door that he held open, and then immediately froze. Sara didn’t spend a lot of time in this room, but she was familiar enough to know what something wasn’t supposed to be there, or hadn’t been there before. The large, kind of sinister looking chair was not a normal feature for this workshop “What the hell is that thing?”
Steve smiled as he followed her into the room, about to comment that he seemed to be around several people that used the theme in their codenames, but came up short when he saw what she was referring to. He quickly crossed the room and put a hand on the chair to make sure it was real and not some weird virtual experiment.
Turning a worried look over to Sara, he used a tone of voice that seemed covered in ice. "This is what Hydra used to control Bucky. We need to let him know it's here."
Sara was well aware of Bucky’s past, largely from a different version of Bucky she knew before this one. She felt a chill that matched the tone of Steve’s words run down her spine. Her tech forgotten, Sara stepped back out of the room, and closed the door. On the security pad beside it she typed in her own passcode to lock down the room and prevent anyone from poking at it. “That’s probably going to be better coming from you.” She wasn’t trying to put the responsibility of delivering bad news on Steve, it was just the truth. “I’ll stay here and keep anyone from going in.”