Okay, I'm sorry. I know I'm supposed to be working on the requested fics. And I am. But I'm not ready to post them yet. So instead you get this.
Buying lunch is hard. And not just because of the twisting labyrinth of strangers with cold eyes, the number of trains and lines and transitions and watch your step when exiting. Not just because of the bright flashing eye-numbing, mind-spinning displays of gigantic color or the squeal scream shuffle of too many humans fighting for space in a city where there is no space. Not just because of the pervading aroma of greed or the stench of the sweaty man pressed too close to him in the subway car. Not just because he can't figure out if the seconds that turn into minutes turn into hours that he's spent getting from his empty apartment to where he stands in line staring up at a motorized menu board with too many choices, can't decide if the time is too long or too short compared to seventy years. It's not like there is anyone he can ask. Even if there is, he doubts they would know the answer because as far as he can tell, there is no answer.
Buying lunch is hard, not just because he doesn't know what those terms on the constantly changing menu with pictures mean. Not just because the fast food place he'd been recommended by Fury as a good place to start is teeming with an impatient mob carrying on so many conversations that he can hear all at once flooding into his eardrums and pounding like ocean waves in the Atlantic, icy dark unfamiliar and just enough to maybe drown him again. Not just because the bottom of the practical brown shoes SHIELD provided him with hold fast to the spilled soda sticky floor and it takes effort to pry them off one dirty tile only to have them sucked again to the next as he's slowly slowly inched forward in line by the pull from ahead and the push from behind.
Buying lunch is hard and not just because the faded creased and worn dollar bill is being subconsciously twisted in his damp hands. Not just because the heavily tattooed woman in front of him is shouting obscenities through a pierced lip at her obnoxious children. Not just because the general chaos in the restaurant, the grease thickened air, the frazzled workers behind the counter, the sickly yellow lights that do little to hid the ketchup stains on the table where men women children stuff their mouths full of sloppy sandwiches and limp fries, makes it difficult for him to do the mental math he needs.
Buying lunch is hard because of all of that and more.
Buying lunch is hard because the huge advertisements of a meal for four ninety-nine circle in his head as the cost of seventeen dozen eggs or twenty-five pounds of pork chops or one hundred and sixty-six pieces of Wrigley's spearmint gum. Four ninety-nine in his head equals twenty tickets to Coney Island or fifty toothbrushes or seven new shirts. Four ninety-nine in his head means enough for a one day hospital visit, enough for five ounces of perfume for his mom on Christmas, enough for the flashlight he and Bucky used when they were kids buried under couch cushions and talking about everything that meant something to them.
Buying lunch is hard because he has to adjust. Has to realize that it's not like that anymore. That the folded paper clutched in his nervous hands is no longer more than a week's salary. It's not a fortune. It's not something to protest and try to give back to Director Fury because it's just too much. The twenty dollar bill doesn't mean now what it meant back then. It's not that it's been discontinued. Or been forgotten. Or become completely obsolete. It's just decreased in value. After all, seventy years is a long time.
Buying lunch is hard because he's not prepared for it. It should be easy. It should be natural. It should be routine. It's none of those things and he can't quite catch his breath it tastes like frying oil. He's not ready but the yelling tattooed woman with the piercing and her rowdy boys are gone and the man behind him impatiently shoves him and suddenly he's in front of the counter, where a girl with a pink ponytail roves her eyes over his body appreciatively from behind what looks like a giant computer. And he's not ready. He doesn't know what to do, is a man without a plan, unprepared, out of his depth floundering while ocean waves crash far above his head as he sinks to the bottom in a metal tomb.
The girl taps her incredibly long sparkly orange plastic nails on the scratched countertop expectantly and there's a gust of hot breath muttering curses across his neck as the hungry man behind him lets him know what he thinks of the delay. But there are too many choices, too many pictures, too many voices sights smells. Too much or too little money. Too much or too little time.
A few last minute calculations run through his strategist's mind before he ends up just pointing. The girl with pink hair asks a clarifying question and he just says yes. He says yes to all her other questions too. In the end, he walks away with fourteen dollars and fifty-eight cents shoved deep into his pocket, the cup for a soft drink he has no idea how to fix himself left on the red countertop, and a paper bag spotted through with leaking grease. He doesn't know of anywhere else to eat it so he sits at a crooked table by the fingerprinted window, brushing aside crumpled straw wrappers and used napkins.
He doesn't know if it's the food itself or just the overload to which he exposed his serum-enhanced senses that causes his nausea. It doesn't matter. The result is still the same. He stumbles through the throng of bodies between him and the thin corridor that proclaims restrooms. In less time than it took to choke it down, his four ninety-nine meal is swirling down the toilet bowl and from his kneeling position beside it, he's able to read the faint logo of the company who manufactured the commode. Sometimes he wishes he didn't notice every detail about every situation.
Fury checks in on him later. Much later. It's been a few days. Fury asks him how was lunch. Hard doesn't seem like the right answer. Certainly not one that the world's only super soldier, the nation's hero, Captain America can give. He searches his brain for another word, a better one, something that isn't a lie. His mind snags on screeching subway lines, four ninety-nine on a glass screen, the taste of oily vomit, and a crumpled twenty that's lost it's value. Different, he decides. Different, he says to Fury, it was different.