06 May 2012
0349 hours
Unknown Location
I was tired, sore, and irritable. Still, I couldn't complain much when I had comfortable clothes (although a little too big), a nice shower (all of the blood was gone now), and all the food I could eat in front of me. I'd always been a fast eater—growing up in a military family and then going to West Point (and joining the military myself) led to that. You only got so long to eat so you ate as much and as fast as you could. Seven bites were all you could chew and you had to put the spoon down between bites. That was the rule during school, anyway. I didn't always put the spoon down but I did lower it when I ate now that I was older and out.
Still, I was starving so I scarfed down my burger and the huge salad I'd made to compromise. That and a huge egg omelet later (because it was three in the morning and I was starving so it was kinda breakfast time) Steve was still eating. I sat back, mostly in a food coma, and sighed contently.
Steve had been watching me scarf down all that with a confused look on his face. I internally rolled my eyes. "Can I help you, soldier?"
He blushed—obviously his tell. "N-no ma'am."
"I don't bite." Unless you want me to. No, that's bad, Joan. He was probably one of the most beautiful men I'd ever seen. Beautiful, kind, perfectly shaped for eyes to roam… Modest, especially. I could only imagine what he looked like with a shirt off. Not that he'd probably ever let me see that.
"For a dame, you're keeping up with me. And I eat four times the normal human being." As soon as he said it, he looked like he'd swallowed something bad.
I wasn't offended. You had to eat a lot to keep muscle and I hadn't eaten in over twenty-four hours. I was determined to eat myself into a food coma. "First off," I said after I swallowed some Rocky Road, "don't ever call me a 'dame' again. Or any woman, for that matter. Your age will be very, very apparent."
"Twenty-six?"
Sassy bastard. I narrowed my eyes. "Secondly...you don't talk to women much, do you?"
"This is the longest I've spent with a broad—sorry, a woman—one-on-one." It was pretty early, so we were the only people in the serve-yourself cafeteria except the poor soul on duty who had to cook our food for us. So, technically, we were still one-on-one. "I've talked to women, just..."
I smirked and waved my spoon at him. "No offense taken, Cap. I'm just in an irritable mood. I'm not meanin' to take it out on you. You did just help save New York, after all. And you did pull a concrete wall off of me."
It was cute to watch the blush spread across his pretty cheekbones. He put down his food and started fiddling with the little smart phone Maria Hill had given him not long after we'd arrived in the cafeteria. She'd left right after. He was quiet, then, and I didn't like it. Even though I was tired, I wasn't ready to go to bed. My body ached and my mind wouldn't stop replaying the day before over and over and over again in my head.
"You know what the worst thing is?" Steve looked up in surprise—it'd been a good ten minutes since we'd last talked. He thought for a moment, obviously thinking of a million things that were worse than what I thought. "I mean, not the worst thing. I mean about my job."
"Besides a concrete wall falling on you?" Steve Rogers raised his perfectly-sculpted eyebrow and made me think about blushing myself. I don't blush.
Instead, I threw a piece of biscuit at him. "Yes, besides that. I'm a PAO. A Public Affairs Officer. I'm responsible for developing a working relationship with reporters and other media representatives, keeping contact with other government agencies, and keeping internal and external publics informed on issues that may affect them. But half the time, I can't do my job. It's usually 'a training accident.' They hide everything. That's all I can ever say. But now, how are they gonna hide you? How am I supposed to explain you?"
His baby blues looked seemingly down into my soul. He clenched his fists like he was angry for being hidden. "Don't hide me, ma'am."
"Joan, Steve. I think we're way past a first-name basis." He didn't know how much I knew about his life. Even though I'd rambled earlier about pretty much all of my life that revolved around Granddaddy Chester, that didn't even begin to explain my obsession with the Star Spangled Man with a Plan. "You dragged me out of a crater. But enough about me. What are you gonna do now that the aliens are gone?" How am I going to explain what you do now that the aliens—another thing I have to explain—are gone?
"Off the record?" He said it jokingly but I could see the hardness in his eyes. I swallowed nervously. "Your dad did say that you're pretty good at your job. Not that I don't trust reporters, but..." He let the sentence taper off as he raised one perfect blond eyebrow at me.
I put down my spoon and wiped my mouth, completely stuffed and officially in food coma mode. "Off the record. Cross my heart and hope to die." I would do anything for a one-on-one with Captain America. "And I'm not a reporter. Just a Public Affairs Officer who's tired of not being able to do her job."
He watched me for a moment with those pretty blue eyes and long, thick blond eyelashes. Then he sighed. "Now that..." He waved his hand in the air, trying to find the words. "All of that is dying down, I don't really know what to do." He looked so lost. He hadn't even known what the microwave was when we'd passed it. He looked like a puppy who'd been left out in a box, even as he stared down at his new cellphone.
I looked at the black rectangle that Steve had been given and figured I had a while before Maria came back to get me for my interrogation. It was hard to believe that, two weeks ago, his last memory was from seventy years ago. He had to have been so lost. Maybe I can get that kicked puppy look off of his face. I motioned to the phone and said, "Give it here and come sit next to me. I'll show you how to use it."
He looked at the rectangle and then back at me a few times before he got up and came to the other side of the picnic table. He handed me the rectangle and I spent the next few moments teaching him how to turn it on and off and how to change the volume. I put my number in and told him that if he ever had any questions, he just needed to start typing my name into the phone app and call me.
"It's kinda like a radio," he said later as I tried to show him how to access the internet.
"A radio with a lot of power, my friend." It took him a long time to realize that his little phone was a computer with a lot more power than just a corded phone. And he was even more confused when I told him that it could be used as a radio, too.
"Why have all of this stuff in a telephone? What's the point? It's just a telephone."
"We call this a 'cellphone'. It's convenient, I guess." I'd never really thought about why people had cellphones—we had computers, too. Why not just have one? Why have so many electronics? "Phones at home are telephones but we just call them phones. The one I talked on earlier was a satellite phone. Even with no service—" I pointed to the bars up at the top of his phone where it said no service "you can call people on a satellite phone."
He looked frustrated and confused, a lot like my grandfather had when I'd tried to explain computers to him at 84-years old. "So I need service to call someone?"
I knew that it would take a long time to teach him anything. "Here, if you ever have any questions, the internet is available on your phone as long as you're connected to WiFi or you have 3G. It looks like you have both." I pointed to where the bars were for his internet connectivity. "It'll take a long time to explain, but you pretty much have a thesaurus on your phone, okay? Touch this button and Google pops up. Google is a search engine that looks across the entire internet for whatever you want to look at. Pick somethin'."
Steve looked pensive for a while. I realized that we were sitting awfully close and our arms were touching. His arm was pure, hard, iron, manly-muscle. I lost track of my own thoughts for a moment until Steve said, "Peggy Carter."
A woman? I didn't know anything about Steve, other than the fact that he was my childhood hero and I'd become a PAO because of his campaign back in the 40's. I knew every word to Star Spangled Man with a Plan and even all of the choreography. I was embarrassed to say anything aloud because my hero was real flesh and bone all of a sudden and I was teaching him how to use the internet. So, what, if he wanted to look up a woman on the internet? "Alright, so you touch the search bar and a keyboard comes up. Type in her name..." He did so, clumsily, as his fingers were huge and he couldn't find all of the letters quickly enough. "Hit 'Google Search'."
Dozens of articles came up on a woman named Peggy Carter. Under the pictures section there were multiple pictures of an older woman winning awards and a younger, beautiful woman in an English WWII-era uniform. Steve's fingers ran over the screen and hit multiple links at once, but the last one opened—a page listing all of Peggy Carter's awards and accomplishments over the years. He looked so enraptured and sad and awed that I couldn't say anything.
"They wouldn't tell me anything. About any of them." His fingers tightened dangerously around the small phone, making the case crack slightly.
"Who?" I asked softly, wanting to comfort him. I would never understand how it felt to wake up seventy years in the future, but I did know what losing teammates was like. And Steve told me about all of them. The Howling Commandos and Captain America practically ended the war against Hydra. And Steve hadn't just lost them—no, he'd been frozen for years and most of his teammates were either dead or so old that they wouldn't be the same.
I could understand why his psychiatrist and SHIELD wouldn't give any information up on his old teammates. Seeing their tombs or their wrinkled faces could possibly send him into an even deeper pit than he was already in. He was angry and scared and confused and probably a little on the PTSD wagon.
He put the phone down a little roughly and looked directly at me. In his eyes were a swirl of emotions that I couldn't fathom. "How's your shoulder?"
"What?" I looked where he was looking, at the shoulder that had popped out of place in the battle. "Oh, it's just sore," I lied.
"You should let a doctor look at that."
What, so they can take my arm, too? I didn't voice my bitterness out loud. My leg suddenly throbbed. How long has it been? Has it been two years? Two years this month... "I don't exactly like doctors. Or hospitals. I've had a dislocated shoulder before, it's not a big deal."
"You should be in a sling, at least. I had a dislocated shoulder before I was...this." He motioned to himself and I felt myself actually blush a little. I turned my face away so that he couldn't see. "It took me twelve weeks to recover. That was with a sling and PT."
Twelve weeks was the longest it took for something like that to heal. Three weeks was the norm in the twenty-first century. "I'll be fine, soldier boy. I don't break easily."
"Captain Phillips," a man's voice said from above us. I looked up into the eyes of an agent that I'd never seen before. "You're needed elsewhere. Hopefully you're up to speed?" He raised an eyebrow at Steve, who was still staring at me.
"No rest for the weary, eh?" The agent didn't even crack a smile. "I may have brought him more up to speed than anything," I said with a small laugh as I stood up. My body was starting to ache and the fatigue had caught up with me. I resisted the urge to put my hand up to my shoulder and massage it, just so I wouldn't see the pity in Steve's eyes. Still, it was nothing like staying awake for days on end to finish reports or scout out dangerous terrorist bases, so I sucked it up and walked over to the man. "Captain Rogers," I said before I walked out the door.
Steve's head flew up, looking me in the eye with the same awed/confused/destroyed look from the phone. "Steve. Just Steve. Steven Rogers, ma'am."
"Steve," I said softly, smiling at him through my fatigue, "don't trust everything you read on the internet. I should know, I write some of it."