She breathed.
She was alive.
She was very startled by that fact.
Stephanie Rogers took a deeper breath to roust herself more awake, and she heard a door open.
"How long have I been asleep?"
She blinked open her eyes to meet the lightly startled brown eyes of a nurse in a…facsimile of a hospital.
"Almost a month, Captain," the nurse said mildly.
Stephanie sat up, the nurse immediately fluttering over to her and trying to get her to lie back down. Stevie ignored her and flexed her various muscles until they didn't burn from stiffness anymore. Then she swiftly undid her IV and lunged for the nurse, having her in a headlock in an instant.
"We can do this the easy way or the hard way," Stevie said mildly into the nurse's ear.
Six armored men with guns burst into the room.
"Well, that explains one question," she said, still very mild. "I'm in the future. How the question is how far?"
"Sixty-eight years," the nurse gasped, sounding a little strangled. "You really have been asleep for a month, you weren't registering brainwaves before that—"
"Hush," she crooned. "That's all I needed to know, doll. Now the question is whether you guys are good guys or bad guys. I'm going with bad guys, based on the guns. I'm really tired of guns being aimed at me. Can you get the nice men with the very futuristic armor to lower their guns?"
"We're not the bad guys, Captain Rogers," one of the armored men said, voice muffled by the helmet.
"You aren't exactly selling it on the dramatic black armor and overkill guns," she said, voice still deceptively mild.
One of the soldiers cocked his head in acknowledgment.
Without warning, Stephanie reached up with a hand and knocked a hole in the wall with her fist. It was wide enough for her head, so she flung herself bodily into the wall, using the nurse as leverage. The result: Stevie went crashing through the wall, and the nurse went flying into the men with guns.
Everyone's happy, and we part ways as unlikely friends, Stevie thought hysterically, not hesitating at the bright colors and enormous buildings and ducking into an alleyway with no shield, no bra, and no shoes.
Damn, running without a bra sucks, she mused to herself.
She ended up at a rape center. They gave her a new (and complete) set of clothes, and a number to call for free counseling. They also checked her for the possibility of a baby (which wasn't one), assured her that there was nothing, and gave her more numbers to other rape victims who were willing to talk about it and help her through it.
Counseling?
Turns out this century is reasonable about people being traumatized by traumatic events. Good for them. Hopefully they have better shrinks.
Since rape and war were two entirely different things, Stevie declined to call any of the numbers. Speaking of calling, holy moly, look at all the phones!
(She revised her awed opinion of them within three minutes spent in Verizon, looking at various phones, looking at apps that wanted personal information. This new century has no privacy, she was finding.)
Stevie found the black market within six hours of being in this new New York City.
("I need papers," she said simply.
"How authentic, and how much are you willing to pay?"
"Authentic enough to stand up to a spy agency looking for anomalies," she said dryly, and laughed at the twitch his eyebrows gave. "I don't have any money, but I'm willing to train ten people everything I know."
"Twenty."
"Thirteen."
"Fifteen."
"Done.")
It ended up taking three months for papers and licenses, so Stevie trained another two people for a place to stay with little to no cameras for four months. Her training them would be done in four or five months total, she guessed, and by the end of it, she would be set up with a job.
Fingers crossed, anyway.
Stevie met Natalie, looked at her three separate times, and ran after she busted her flour bag open, filling the room with murky white.
She later came back and paid her landlord in cash for both the broken contract and the mess that she left in the room.
Selling her doodles was fun, and it made her money. Paper and charcoal were extremely inexpensive, despite the difference from inflation. It wasn't her main source of income, however—that relied on her skills as an "administrative assistant" to a dental hygienist. It wasn't much, but Stevie was frugal and knew how to save.
"You are a pain to track down," "Natalie" said admiringly over coffee. She hadn't touched hers and neither had Stevie. "Seventy years on ice and you basically vanish after only five hours' worth of introduction."
"The serum helped with a lot," Stevie said. "Learning curve, as well as my body being able to keep up with my mind. Though, I haven't had my period yet, and I'm dreading it."
Natalie blinked twice. "What relevance does that have to do with anything?"
Stevie looked at her dryly, her charcoal-smudged fingers wrapped around the warm cup, even if she'd never drink out of it. "My first was when I was twenty-one, a month and a half after I was injected with the serum. It lasted for six days. I ran a hundred and three degree fever for four of them, and was unconscious for six days after the first day and a half overwhelmed me."
Natalie looked appropriately horrified, and whipped out a notepad, writing several names down.
"This," she said, tapping the first one and sliding the piece of paper over, "is Midol, made specifically for women and our cycles. This is ibuprofen—basically aspirin—and can lower fever and reduce pain. In case you get headaches like someone else I know, this is Excedrin Migraine, which is basically pain killers paired with caffeine to ramp up the effects. I would guess that you'd have to take triple the usual dose for any of them for it to actually help you."
Stevie took the paper and looked at it carefully. "Thanks," she said, smiling. "Hopefully no one knocks and tries to take me to the hospital."
"That would take all the fun out of this," Natalie agreed, a secret smile hovering over her lips.
"Are you ever going to bring your partner to one of our truces?" Stevie asked curiously.
"Please," Natalie scoffed. "I have enough testosterone hovering around me. Let's not ruin this—" she gestured between the two of them, "—with more of it."
Stevie cackled. "Peggy would've loved you," she informed the spy.
Natalie just smiled. "By all accounts, she was an amazing Director. I got to meet her once; that woman is sassy. They don't put that in the history books."
Stevie grinned. "Why do you think I said that she would've loved you?"
The shopkeeper had not been expecting two women to break out into an intense and acrobatic fight in the middle of his store, that was for sure, Stevie mused as she grabbed Natalie's ankle and had to use almost all her strength to wrench her leg from around her neck.
"We need some help," Natalie panted after she clawed through the plastic encasing a loaf of bread. (Which, speaking of, what the hell? Wasn't plastic made to be durable? How disappointing.)
"It's not a truce day," Stevie said, hurling a Campbell's soup can at ninety miles an hour at the redhead's sternum.
"No," Natalie agreed, dodging the can and ripping through the cardboard containing a length of extension cords like it was tissue paper and snapped it like a whip, wrapping it around Stevie's left leg painfully, and then yanked. Stevie was thrown on her back, but wrapped her ankle in the cord twice more, then grabbed the corner of an aisle and used it to do a backwards somersault, Natalie letting go of the cord just in time to avoid being yanked onto her front. Stevie landed on her feet, shaking her leg to get rid of the cord and settling into her old, familiar boxing stance. "But the world's working on ending at the moment, so we're kind of pressed for superheroes."
"You still work for those bastards?" Stevie asked nonchalantly as the two women tumbled into an extensive use of martial arts.
"SHIELD are the good guys," she said, like she did every time when Stevie brought them up. "And yeah, I've worked for the bad guys, too, so I actually know what I'm talking about."
"Lying to me and then being surrounded and threatened with automatic guns isn't the best way to introduce oneself as a good guy," Stevie said.
"No, they screwed that one up," Natalie agreed.
"I'm not meeting them on their base," Stevie said flatly.
"You're kind of going to have to," Natalie disagreed. "The rest will be meeting there."
"I'm certain that I can chat with them just as easily over Skype in the middle of Central Park," Stevie said. "Besides, I'm tired enough of testosterone that I've considered asking you out on an actual date to scare off the rest of the suitors. Travelling with thirty-something stinky men in an active warzone takes the romance right out of you."
Natalie broke her hold on Stevie's arms to laugh helplessly. "If I get to suffer through it, Stevie, so do you. And if they do something stupid, I promise that I'll deck Fury myself."
Sorry, sorry, I'm prepping for hurricane season and got distracted. Hurricane season is coming early this year, I have a tropical storm working on being overhead in several hours. It's irritating. Enjoy!
-Ruby