The next morning, we all got back to work. Steve had woken up after almost 20 hours of sleep. His system must have been working overtime to right some of the damage to his body. The medical team, directed by Dr. Cho had pounced on him immediately: drawing blood, doing a cardiac stress test, and generally subjecting him to whatever combination of tests and procedures they could think of. I had been through my own barrage of testing earlier. But as my health hadn't been affected by the substance in my system, and his had been, his monitoring was considerably more intense. They must have explained to him that we had to keep separated because Anna kept yelling suggestions to the medical team through the intercom, gesticulating wildly through the glass until they followed through with them.

The windows to the suite had all been cleared and the curtains drawn back again, so we could see each other through them, and the two rooms, containment suite and lab, felt more like one continuous space. Over the course of the morning, I could swear I felt eyes on me, but whenever I glanced over to Steve, I found him occupied again by the demands of the medical team. For my own part, whenever there was a lull in my work, I would catch myself watching him, daydreaming. But with the craziness going on, there was no space in time where we could talk. The crisis had thrown everything into disarray. Besides the present health and safety disaster, there had been all the regular Avengers business which now had to be adjusted. There were contingency plans to set into motion, and missions to delay.

I hoped he understood why I had seemingly abandoned him. I think he must have, because at one point, for a moment, our eyes caught each other's from across the room. He was standing behind the window to the containment suite while Helen and a nurse were fussing with a piece of equipment in front of him, and I was tuning out of an argument Tony had gotten into with one of the lab techs over some minutiae of radiation-metal interaction. When Steve saw he had caught my attention, he raised his hand in a little wave and mouthed a silent Hi.

Hi. I mimed back at him, waving my own fingers.

He quirked the corner of his mouth up in a grin and made a shrugging gesture at the room, I guessed at the weirdness of the situation.

I huffed out a cross between a laugh and a sigh and nodded slightly, grinning shyly.

But then something Helen did recalled Steve to his situation, and the argument in front of me reached the point where it demanded my attention, and the moment was gone.

We had our chance to reconnect properly again at lunch. Someone had ordered in Chinese food for the whole lab, and we broke into little groups to eat. Steve and I wound up with chairs and trays in the corner, eating lunch; together save for the pane of thick glass separating us. I sensed Anna's interference in the way that we had been left alone, but was grateful for it anyway.

We started talking about easy things, like our work. Steve was attentive and asked questions that showed he was genuinely interested. I asked about some of the major events of his own career, some of which I had been at the periphery of, cleaning up the aftermath, and some of which I only had knowledge of from a combination of the news, and the Avengers/SHIELD files that I had read shortly after I had been granted security clearance. Steve shared a little of what they had been, from his perspective, and I was unsurprised to learn that neither the public story nor the official classified documentation had been quite the whole truth.

People gave us a bit of space, but the talk stayed very small, because we could sense the people around us trying to resist the urge to eavesdrop, and some of them doing it better than others.

While the Chinese food was classic takeout, someone had done their research, and it was pretty delicious. Poor Steve was on hospital fare, pre-measured amounts of starch, protein and fat in the form of a very sad looking turkey dinner, in order to monitor his metabolism.

"Still better than army C-rations. The speed at which you get sick of canned meat mush is... not surprising at all, actually."

As we continued chatting about food, I was surprised to learn that Steve's favourite meal was Thai curry, the hotter, the better. I would have thought that a man of his era would gravitate towards the plain, wholesome foods of his youth, but he shared his curiosity for new cuisines, and bold flavours.

"Although," he confided, "my go-to comfort food is still creamed peas on toast. I's not so popular nowadays. Sam can't stomach even the look of it, but it's great on a rainy afternoon."

Conversation drifted towards cooking and kitchens, and then where we lived.

"I had an apartment in New York, before the Avengers relocated. It was back in my SHIELD days. Natasha helped me set it up. I was still just as busy back then, so the kitchen didn't get much use, but I still had it. Now we're living much more communally. I've got a little kitchenette in my suite in the residential wing, and the Avenger's common area has a full kitchen, but more often than not, I end up in the Facility's mess.
"How about you, are you local?"

"So much of my work requires travel, often trailing your team around, that it doesn't really matter where I live. I'm not much of a city girl, so I've got a little cabin in the woods. It's not too far from here, and the commute to the city's a reasonable distance. I guess it's not the most practical arrangement, but I like having somewhere I can retreat to. It's very peaceful out there."

"Sounds nice."

"It is, although it's a little isolated. The drive's not too bad, although owning an SUV would be more practical than the little coupe I've been driving. They're so hard on gas, I just couldn't bear to take the environmental hit. Smaller is better. A motorcycle would be the best on gas, I suppose, but they're just too dangerous. I know they're fun to drive, but way too many people die in motorcycle crashes for them to be a reasonable choice. It's just not worth it."

Steve let out a small cough. "You know I have a motorcycle, right?" he asked, quirking up the corner of his mouth in a small smile.

My eyes widened, and I bit my tongue. I'd really put my foot in it now. "Oh, I mean..." and then I pause, appreciating the absurdity of questioning the transportation choices of a man who regularly smashed up planes for a living... while he was still in them. "I suppose you may be an exception."

"You know that what I do for the team puts me in harm's way, almost every single mission," he responded, turning serious. "Can you learn to live with that?"

"Oh, I absolutely respect the work you do. The world needs you. I can see that every choice you've made has been considering what needs to be done for the greater good. You're a very selfless person, and I love that about you. If you just added me into your calculations going forward, I'd be content."

Our conversation drifted again into less personal topics. I was in the middle of a story about a fishing trip gone wrong, and working through my second helping of chow-mein, when I noticed that Steve's attention was focused mostly on my mouth. He had been so consistent with his attentiveness until this point that I couldn't help but draw my tongue seductively across my top lip, then slowly biting the bottom one, causing the supremely coordinated Captain America to fumble his fork, dropping it on his tray, and tipping his now-empty soup bowl onto the floor.

"Oops, sorry. Sorry."

I couldn't help but laugh as he broke into a profusion of apologies towards the nurse who had gotten up from her own lunch to help try to control the mess.

He sat back down a little flustered, but the spell had been broken. And since he had finished his meal, and my food was basically done, there was nothing left to do but to go back to work.

"Well," I said regretfully, "I guess I'll talk to you again at dinner."

"Yeah. I can't wait till our next 'date'."

We grinned slightly awkwardly at each other for a second, and then he rose to clear his tray, and I turned my attention back to the lab.

Much later that evening when we all broke for a meal again, dinner turned out to be hot-dogs, sausage rolls, and frozen bananas for dessert. When I realised, I turned and glared at Tony, who gave me his best I-have-no-idea-why-you-would-be-upset look, which just confirmed to me that he was the guilty party.

I had another quiet chat with Steve, over the evening meal, and then we all wrapped up our work for the day. Despite showing no signs of further deterioration or radiation, Steve still wasn't quite up to his regular super-human health, and at 11pm Anna checked his vitals and decreed it his bedtime.

While that first day had been filled with medical talk and monitoring and crisis, our second day was just as busy, spent with half medical follow-up and just enough time to return to matters previously postponed. With most of his medical testing out of the way, Steve had a portable Avengers command centre set up, and everyone just had to come to him. I wasn't officially in the loop, but I gathered that there was an important mission that had to be postponed due to this unexpected crisis taking priority, but it still needed to be ready to go the moment that Steve was cleared as safe to interact with the public. Meanwhile, I had my own matters to take care of, although I still made this my priority. But, when I couldn't think any more on the subject or when we were waiting for results to come back in, I checked in with my Damage Control team, delegating tasks and resolving problems/roadblocks that they hadn't been able to sort out on their own.

We were making good progress. Helen had settled on gene therapy as the most promising route towards a solution. I had isolated the culprit molecule from the chemical soup that had been the result of the explosion. Anna had tracked it's interaction with Steve's physiology, and Helen had come up with a plan to clear it, and its effects from his system. Although we still had no idea of the mechanism of the interaction, which was something we were going to have to figure out eventually, we all relaxed a bit, now that there was a solution in sight.