all_inclusive | Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore

Elsa's gotten a better grip of her powers of late, even feeling comfortable enough to go without gloves for longer and longer periods of time. But she's still prone to being startled and, when a stranger appears behind her in the lobby, Elsa jumps and a few spikes of ice rise up a few feet behind her.

"I. Oh. I didn't see you!"

The lines of the walls having drawn Steve's gaze up and up, he stood with his head tipped back to stare at the ceiling with what was mixed fascination and utter, utter confusion. The abruptly broken years of art school might not have been what had sparked his appreciation for beauty or for form, but the lessons learned there had done enough to be sure he understood how the architecture of the room was designed so seamlessly to please and impress.

It was a ridiculous thing to be distracted by when he had no idea how he had stepped from Kansas to...whatever this place was, but even as he knew that, he could not help but take a moment to let his surroundings sink in.

A short moment, and one soon interrupted by the sound that could be best described as a slick scraping noise, and the cool tones of a woman's soprano. He dropped his chin and turned to look, seeing first the woman, pale and pretty and wide-eyed, and then the ice. "Did that-" he lifted a hand to point to the sharp points, unnerved by the appearance of what he hadn't thought he could have missed. "Ma'am, were those there a moment ago?" His voice was not unkind despite his being taken aback, but ice never had been all that friendly to him before.

Elsa bites her lip, nervous as she glances between the stranger (tall and handsome, just like Prince Hans) and the ice spikes. "Please. I didn't mean to. My control isn't very good sometimes..."

She tries to regain herself, hold herself like a queen and not a scared little girl.

"You startled me."

Remorse carved through him immediately at the sight of her drawing back from him in fear, and Steve knew he had forgotten himself. No matter that it had been years since Erskine’s experiment and that he had lived in his new, broader and taller body for all of that time, the twenty-five years of his having been as small, if not smaller, than the woman in front of him had never left his mind. He couldn’t excuse the command in his tone when he had asked her about the ice. It was a tone meant for battlefields and challenge, and no matter how unnerved he might have been (was, that he was) by the sudden appearance of ice, he should have remembered that he stood easily over the woman who was all winter colors and delicate lines.

He moved instinctively to soften the hard lines of his body language, turning his hands over to offer her his palms up rather than his finger pointing directly to the spears of ice. As alien as the world around him was, as great his confusion over how he had gotten there, or even where ‘there’ was, he had no right to threaten a strange dame and he knew it.

“No, no, I’m sorry, ma’am.” His tone gentle, he tried for a small smile as he apologized, wanting to prove in that moment that he was anything but the kind of bully he so hated. “You took me by surprise too, that’s all.” While his gaze slid back to the ice behind her, he buried the anxiousness made by the memory of the ice rushing up to swallow him whole and instead commented “You made those, huh? That’s a pretty neat trick.”

When the demanding tone softens, Elsa lets out the breath she only now realizes she's been holding. She's still nervous, but fight or flight has faded out in favor of answering the question. "Sorry, I can't make them go away."

She steps sideways, moving away from the wall she uses to surround herself. It's not an attack against him, just her own defense.

"I was born with this and I've never...When I'm startled, it's harder."

Never had Steve wanted to become the bully he had fought so long and so hard against. The years in the field and in the thick of the War with the Commandoes had made it easy to fall into the command role that had gone from purely ornamental to earned with the sweat of his brow and strategy as much as the application of sheer force. The fear in her eyes reminded him too well of the words he had slung at Tony, those moments he had allowed his frustration and his resentment against the world to get the better of him and said things that had his ears nearly going red in embarrassment just with the memory of them.

"It's okay," he told her, though he had no idea if it was or if someone would get angry over the presence of shards of ice sticking up out of the floor of that grand place. "They'll melt, right?" He wanted to reassure even where he felt as if he had been thrown into foreign territory without even a map or a compass in his belt.

He was hardly going to condemn her for what seemed to be issue enough for her. He hadn't with Dr. Banner, he'd be a hypocrite and a fool to hold that strange ability of hers against her. "I'll be sure to let you know before I pop up in your way again," he told her, giving her that small smile again before he held out one hand, still clad in the motorcycle gloves he'd picked up somewhere around Tennessee. "Name's Steve, ma'am."

Elsa's a little hesitant until she notices the thick gloves, assuring her that they won't touch skin to skin. It's hard to tell how naturally cold her touch is, but she doesn't want to hurt him. Finally, she extends her own hand and shakes it.

"I'm Elsa, from Arendelle," she says. "It's nice to meet you."

Then she looks back at the ice. They're knee-high and thick at the base, but delicate otherwise and melting already. "Yes, just ordinary ice. Except for my making it."

Only the drop of her eyes down to his hand, lingering there for a moment long enough to tell him her hesitation might have had something to do with touch (whether personal or general, he wasn't sure) reminded Steve that he wore gloves at all. He rarely did as a civilian, but had found that he had grown too used to the feel of leather stretching across his knuckles when he sat astride his bike to have given up the habit of them.

The 'from Arendelle' reminded him a moment of Thor's way of speaking. A thought that as ludicrous enough on its own, what with the Asgardian being several times over the slip of a woman's size, all gold and beard and great muscles where Elsa looked as if a stiff wind might blow her over. The last thought he kept firmly to himself, as even as terrible as he was at speaking to woman, he knew better than to assume that a woman was any less dangerous or capable than himself.

His hand swallowed hers easily, though he kept his grip careful to keep from accidentally injuring her. He eyed the ice when she did before nodding, suppressing the urge to step away from the ice as he had already made her uncomfortable once and he hardly wanted to make the same mistake twice. "It's Steve, from Brooklyn, then. I guess," he told her, lips curling again.

"It's...nice to meet you." She bites her lips and withdraws her hand. "I'm sorry. I don't know how cold I am. To others."

The cold's never really affected her, but Elsa has seen the way that people recoil from the cold, how they shiver. She doesn't want to hurt them in any way.

"I don't have a lot of control."

Didn't really matter to him that he had met the woman just a few moments before. That he had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there from that dusty Kansas highway. The shyness and nervousness of her that rounded her shoulders and made her look more small than she already was was more than enough to make him want to erase some of it. He let her hand slip from his without a fight, but shook his head and assured her, "You don't really need to worry about that with me, ma'am." The earnest tone of his voice was not unmarked by a stab at humor as he added, "I'm more resilient than I look."

He wasn't about to lie to her and tell her he'd ever been fond of ice or the cold, it wouldn't have seemed right to unless there seemed to be no other option. Never mind that he had spent too many winters shivering in the thin-walled apartment he'd had with his mother when he'd been young, feeling his lungs rattle about in his thin chest as he had struggled to breathe. The ice had been unpleasant long before he'd been trapped in it for seventy years, but she didn't look like she needed to know that just then.

"There's no one who could help you with that?" he asked, curious. "To learn to control it, I mean."

"There are people who've helped me learn control but..." Elsa raises a bare hand, letting a tiny flurry cycle up by her hand and then dissipate, shaking her head. "There's no one I've ever known with powers like this. Not in Arendelle. Not here."

It seems that, even across more than one universe, Elsa is meant to be alone and different forever.

"It gets stronger every year..."

Steve understood loneliness, the feeling of being entirely in the world with no way to be seen to bridge the gap between himself and those he saw around him. He had seen it enough in the mirror to know it when he saw it in Elsa's eyes then. He was torn between that knowledge, the desire to alleviate a degree of that, and the fact that he did not know how he could help her.

He knew nothing of her ability, had known no one who had struggled with anything quite like it (he didn't think Dr. Banner's transformation could be compared to what she could do, they were so different).

"I'm sure there's someone out there that can help," he told her, finally. "Maybe you just haven't found them yet."

"Maybe," Elsa says, but she doesn't sound certain. Wouldn't they have found someone by now if she had?

"You must have so many questions," she finally says, resorting to all her training. Royal comportment and behavior.

While he had the feeling she was capable of more than a few (now melting) spears of ice that had made a temporary, protective fence around her, Steve was not entirely sure it was something he should pry into. If he had had any experience he might have shared with her, any common ground in ability he might have been able to translate to be of the help she seemed to be in such need of, it would have been a different matter. It was, however, not the case, and as dazzling as even that small flurry she'd summoned had been, the last thing he wanted to do was make things worse for her.

"There's been stranger things," he offered, one corner of his mouth lifting in what he hoped was encouragement before he was sidetracked by her statement. "I do," he agreed, "This place- do you have any idea how I got here?"

"They say it's like a crossroads, between worlds and dimensions," Elsa explains, not quite understanding it herself. "Some doors open back to your home. Or to other places."

Not that she's tried to look for Arendelle. Surely, if she stays far away the storm will fade on its own and they'll all be safe from her. She has rooms to hide in here, places where she won't cause any harm. "They don't exactly appear in obvious places. I ran out onto the fjord and then here I was."

"So," he thought back to the Tesseract and how it had allowed the movement across dimensions, or across deep space to parts of the universe man might otherwise never see. "They're portals?" His travel had been missing anything of the Cube's glowing blue energy, or the screeching at the edges of his hearing capabilities, and while that was comforting in its way, the experience was all the more alien for that lack of reference.

He considered her use of the term 'fjord' and was reminded instantly of the arctic, of Greenland, but the strangeness of her accent being nothing like he had heard in the radio broadcast reports of the Danish Resistance during the war. "Arendelle," he began, curious, "What country is that in?"

Edited 2014-03-11 23:20 (UTC)

"Country?" Elsa asks, caught off guard a moment. "It's a kingdom of its own. Our neighbors include Norway, but its a sovereign nation."

It's her nation, more to the point. Even if she's all but given up her crown, it doesn't change the fact that Elsa had been raised to become its queen from birth.

"Where is Brooklyn?"

Where he had thought briefly that she might have belonged to a different world, the explanation easy enough for her abilities from what he had already seen of aliens and Asgardians. If magic and illusions were possible, why wouldn't some sort of frost ability? Her words put that theory to rest, unless other worlds also had places called Norway, which he supposed was possible but unlikely. "I'm sorry," he was sure to tell her, "I didn't mean to offend."

He remembered vaguely the reports of mutated individuals in his world world who had a wide range of abilities. Certainly he had come across one or two people back in the war who had been capable of things beyond human capability and who had not been part of Schmidt's experiments. Perhaps that explained the ice?

"It's a city in New York, in America." Steve would've admitted freely that he often forgot not everyone might know where Brooklyn was, it was so deeply embedded within him. The sun set in the West, egg creams were always delicious, and Brooklyn was Brooklyn.

"New York," Elsa says longingly. "I've heard it's wonderful there. But I've never traveled."

She's barely seen much of her own small kingdom, or even the entirety of the castle. All her life has been spent in the same few rooms, kept away where other people would be safe from her. It's hard to imagine getting to see the rest of the world now, especially when she's ever more uncontrollable.

"It's just. We're a proud country. I know it's not big, but it's still my--our. Our Kingdom."

New York didn't feel as if it belonged to him as it had before. It had suffered too much just weeks before he last remembered, and had changed too much in his absence for it to be exactly as he had last known it. And still he had to smile at her compliment, the love for his city still beating warm in his chest.

"I get that," he told her. "It's home, right? There's nothing like home, in the end."

Home. The word conjures up her childhood, sneaking into the ballroom at night with Anna and sitting by the fire with her parents. Storybooks and snowmen. None of what she imagines is recent, not in the cold and empty rooms or the barren hallways, nor in her ice palace or coronation. No wonder it had been so easy to leave all of that far behind. None of it had been home to her.

"I'm supposed to rule it but...I'm so dangerous. How could I?"

"If you don't mind me saying so, ma'am," he told her, the tone of his voice gone gentle but firm as he attempted to make his point known without having her startle away from him again. Tremulous women who were unsure of themselves were rarer in his life than spitfires and powerhouses who owned every inch of the world they strode through, leaving him at a continued loss when it came to Elsa as she pulled so tightly into herself that he thought she might shatter if he breathed too heavily in her direction. "I've met all kinds of people, and I don't think there's anything that can keep you from doing what you think is right if you put your mind to it."

He gave her a gentle smile, struggling through his own clumsiness with women to feel sure of much he offered her beyond that it was heartfelt.

"Even be a good queen?" she feels like a stray deer in Steve's presence. Every instinct is to run, to avoid talking more about it, but he holds her gaze without any force and it fascinates her at the same time. He doesn't even know her, Elsa thinks, but he speaks confidently about the good she can do.

"It doesn't seem worth it if I can't do them well."

"If you believe in what you're doing and you love your people, I don't see why you couldn't be a great queen." While he would have been the first to admit that he knew almost nothing about monarchy or queens, as withdrawn as the woman was and as easily startled as she appeared to be, he couldn't see how her ability should keep her from being the best for what her people needed. "You obviously love your kingdom, ma'am. Maybe you need to be more cautious than most, considering what you can do, but you shouldn't let that keep you from being who you want to be."

Elsa smiles a little, not just because of Steve's kindness. The words remind her of Anna, of her unfaltering confidence.

"You should meet my little sister sometime. She never stops believing in the good."

On Bucky's first day, the polite and acquiescing people at the hotel's front desk had insisted to him that he wasn't dead. Today was his third day, and despite that he was resolutely certain that he wasn't in heaven, he still wasn't convinced that he hadn't caught a stray bullet at some point and bled out on a frost-covered battlefield.

Scrubbed and polished, his clothes new and unfamiliar, he felt like he'd been assimilated into a high-class fever dream.

Two things he could give the place, though: The girls were gorgeous and the food was good. Idleness sat poorly on him, itched on his skin like a rash, and he was eating more than he probably oughta been as a sort of distraction—All those months with nothing but cruddy rations, and it seemed like a pretty sound plan.

Having just finished his lunch, he was moseying across the lobby and considering whether it was too early yet to start drinking, when he spied an unmistakable blonde head across the room. Half a tick of hesitation to jump-start his drowsy brain, and he launched into a sprint, hurdling over a sofa and coffee table to keep to the shortest path.

"Steve!" he called, and all but threw himself at the other man, arms clapping on in a rough hug.

Nothing could have added to the surreality that seemed to have taken up his life in that moment than that voice. That voice above all others.

The world in surprise was one he had grown used to being one that moved slower than him, so much slower than the new sharpness of his reflexes and the abilities he had honed to match the new shape and strength of his body. But there, just there with Bucky's voice ringing out too familiar in the air, the world felt as if it rushed by him to leave him stunned and slow, hardly able to do more than turn toward that sound before the beat of booted feet over polished floors became his best friend in all the world barreling toward him.

It did not matter that there wasn't a way on heaven or earth that it could be real, that he had seen the other man fall to his death so long ago that mourning Bucky had become as much a part of his day as breathing, not when the man he had met in that alley so long ago crashed into him and Steve was able to do nothing but hug him back.

"Bucky," he breathed, careful only to not squeeze too tight for fear of breaking even that illusion. "God, Bucky."

"'Bout time you showed up, this place is seriously lacking in entertainment," Bucky said as he stepped back, a hand still clasped against Steve's impossibly broad shoulder. Even now, buoyant and smiling and delighted as hell, Bucky didn't think he'd ever really get used to this Steve—Knew he shouldn't even be separating one from the other, really, but it was hard as hell to look at this shining pillar of American masculinity and imagine him as the scrappy little guy he'd left back in Brooklyn.

"You look confused," Bucky continued, and gave Steve's shoulder a reassuring pat. "I'd be confused, too. Was confused. All you really need to know is that the food is free, the girls are beautiful, and there's no Hitler."

The entirety of his brain seemed to have stuttered to a stop at the dual impossibility of the sight and the sound of Bucky there before him. No explanation for either could have explained how the other man was concrete to the touch in a way he couldn't wave away as his hallucinating the whole encounter.

He could not help the broad smile that stretched across his face, or the fact that he made no move to let go of his friend before Bucky stepped back on his own. None of it made sense. Not where he was, not Bucky looking happy and whole, not a word that the other man said. For a moment he wondered if he'd been killed, that he stood in some version of Heaven (the things Bucky said weren't exactly far from that), but it looked like nothing like what the nuns had told them of and he had to think Bucky might have mentioned that straight off.

As much as he didn't want to question it for fear that he would ruin it, that it was a dream he'd wake up from, he had to ask. "Where are we?"

"Hotel," Bucky replied with a sweeping gesture across the lobby. "Don't ask me how this all works, all I know is we're not on Earth anymore, and no matter how pretty the girls are, I'm apparently not dead yet. You try to get back yet?"

The break had done him good, Bucky wouldn't deny that, but for the first time he'd begun to fully appreciate how Steve had felt, being left behind while everyone else had gone off to war. This place was making him feel useless and lazy, all those skills and careful training just going to waste as he got drunk and pretended at happiness.

Despite the fact that he had been inspecting his surroundings just moments before, Steve still followed Bucky's gesture as if he could find something new in his friend's perspective. "No," he said, shaking his head. "I haven't- not yet."

He looked back behind himself without much expectation that he would find the door he had walked through to find himself in that lobby, confirming that that belief when he found an open hallway behind him rather than any scuffed metal and glass door to a diner. It added to the suggestion that he was dreaming, for all the solidness of Bucky and the razor-sharp set of his senses that suggested reality and not a dreamscape. Whether he would have reached for that door even if it had been there...with Bucky standing there in front of him he had to doubt that he would. "How long have you been here, Buck? I got here a minute ago."

"This is day three," Bucky replied, instinctively holding up three fingers. Leaning in, he arched his eyebrows, mouth setting into a serious line. "They give you a room, but I'm starting to go a little stir-crazy, you know? I haven't been able to find a way back yet, the door I came through was just gone. Apparently that's something that happens, but I'm not convinced they're not just screwing with me. Wouldn't be the weirdest thing about this place."

No, the weirdest, Bucky thought, was how despite all of that, the place didn't give him the heebie-jeebies. People came from all over, all different times, but they were mostly polite, and there wasn't much to make a fuss over. He'd walked through scenic Austrian villages that felt more sinister than this place.

"So, if you're going back, I think I'll hitch a ride with you," he finished with a decisive nod Steve's way. "Don't know how you've survived without me as it is." Smirking, he afforded Steve's shoulder another solid pat.

The confusion over how he had arrived could not eclipse the fact that Steve could not, would not, did not want to ask when Bucky last remembered being at his side. No answer he might receive would do him the least bit of good, he had to think, and even as he had to bite back the urge to tell his friend absolutely anything (as he always had), the idea of it hurt like little else could. The memory of having lost Bucky was still agony, the sharp bite of alpine wind against his face and the feel of metal rungs beneath his gloved hands still as secure in his mind as the dust on his skin in that very moment and the feeling of the boots around his feet, the jacket across his shoulders.

In all honesty, he did not even know where to begin. There was Bucky, there was a hotel with disappearing doors. What was he supposed to do with that?

He nodded in reply to Bucky's announcement as, no matter how unsure he was about the rest of the world, or what implications such an action might have, he was willing to risk it all if it meant that he had his best friend back. As selfish as it was, he did not want to wake up if it were a dream. And if it were reality...

"I don't either," he told him. "Who else'll be there distracting all the dames and drinking for the both of us?"

"See? Exactly," Bucky replied, spreading both hands in a decisive gesture, as if that settled the matter. "My talents are wasted here, it's a damned tragedy." Leaning to get a look past Steve's considerable, unsettling bulk, Bucky scanned the lobby wall beyond, its various and disparate doors marching neatly down the room.

"So which one's yours?" He flicked a glance back up at Steve, expression still easy but blue eyes bright with a brittle desperation.

Steve dropped a hand against his jeans and brought up a small cloud of kicked up Kansas dust, distracting him a moment with that small banality beside the sheer impossibility of Bucky alive and well at his side. Just a moment, but a moment enough to make him think that maybe he wasn't dreaming. Just maybe.

That was too cruel a hope to latch onto, and he pushed it hard to the side in favor of looking back to his buddy. He followed the other man's gaze and looked over those doors to try to figure out which could have been what he had stepped through or might lead back to where he had come. "I don't- I don't actually know."

"You know what? That's alright. We'll figure it out later," Bucky said with a quick little nod, although his gaze continued to drift back to the wall, as if he half expected a door to appear with Property of Steve Rogers written across it.

"I'm just glad you're here, buddy," he continued, forcing his eyes back, and when he smiled, it was genuine. "From… where in the heck did you come from?" he asked, and took half a step back to get a good look at his friend for the first time. "Last I checked, that wasn't regulation uniform, Captain."

It was, admittedly, relatively rare that Martha ran into people who were new straightaway--she was, perhaps, not overly ideal as welcome wagon, though certainly better than some, but she'd never been the kind of person who haunted the lobby. She was just cutting through towards the gym, actually.

But it was pretty easy to spot a newcomer from the way they looked as they stood in the foyer, she realised upon spotting the tall and handsome and frankly rather dusty man. It was an expression she'd worn enough times herself, in a previous life: surprised, amazed, and a bit bewildered.

"Sorry, but are you all right?" she asked with a concerned smile, adjusting the bundle of towel and kit under her arm.

Where he had heard - along with everyone else in the world at the time, he had thought - of Kansas' dust storms when he'd been a teenager, he had thought they were over and done with. How wrong he'd been was clear in the none-too-fine layer that felt as if it covered him from head to toe. It was a sensation that wasn't exactly pleasant, but really he would have been the first to admit that he'd had far worse over with the Commandoes, or even in New York when he'd earned a thick layer of grime, smoke and blood in a matter of an hour or two.

It was a state he had forgotten about with the step from one place to another, where even as he craned his head to look over his shoulder and found nothing but more of that grand room, he was not sure what he was looking at.

"What?" he asked, following the voice with a turn of his head. "Yes, no- I think so?" The woman looked friendly enough, pretty and smiling and...British? She stood somewhere around a foot shorter than him but looked more secure in her skin in that moment than he had managed outside of a uniform for longer than he could remember. "Something strange just happened."

"Pretty much how things go," said Martha, nodding a little. "I wish I could tell you it wasn't as strange as all that, but to be honest, it probably was." American, not like she couldn't tell from the look of him (yes, Americans looked a certain way, no, she wasn't being racist, it was more an aura of bloody-minded idealism than anything else, and this guy had it in spades).

She set her gym kit down on a nearby sofa and extended a hand, the smile playing across her lips located somewhere between wry and amused. "You're not panicking, so that's at least a good start. Welcome to the Nexus Hotel. I swear it's not like The Shining."

"Well, I was just in Kansas and now-" he pointed behind his shoulder with one finger and then to where his boots were on that oh so polished floor, the gesture encompassing all his confusion in having been transported from one place to another without so much as a hitch in his step. The resignation in his voice had him less crushed and accepting of the twists that his life appeared took in the wake of Erskine and the Serum. Frankly, he thought, it made more sense to keep his head and keep his eyes and ears open than to get worked up prematurely over the latest turn of the world around him.

The woman appeared to be relaxed and made no move to suggest she might be a threat, and while Steve knew better than to discount a woman as anything but equally capable of knocking him on his ass, it did do something to put him at ease to see what looked like simple honest written in her expression.

There was no hesitation in him for reaching out to shake her hand, careful as ever to keep his grip firm but not overwhelmingly so. "I'm beginning to get a little too used to weird," he admitted, though he had to pause with the confusion of "Like the what?"

"I'm sparing you the Dorothy joke that obviously comes to mind when you say you've been swept away from Kansas," said Martha. She noticed the strength of the grip, that it was being limited (tension in the wrist was a giveaway). "You do get that one I hope. As compared to The Shining. Horror movie about a spooky hotel...Kubrick...Jack Nicholson...no?"

She'd gotten too used to people getting references lately, she had to get out of the habit. It was a bad one. "Well, welcome to the hotel for people who are a little too used to weird," she continued. "You're not dead and you're not insane, to start off with instead of something sciencey and complicated, but you are definitely somewhere else."

Edited 2014-03-11 22:13 (UTC)

On those pilgrimages to the movies to see just about every film that had been available, most of his pocket money having been spent on the afternoon matinee, Steve didn't think he had thought all that much about the future of movies. Or, that if he had he had thought only as far as deciding which of the many he saw would have any staying power (there was precious little else to distract him, particularly in the first years of the war), he had proven almost entirely wrong. So, it was doubly reassuring to see that he could still rely on Oz to get him through. "See," he told her, a full fledged smile breaking out on his face. "That one I know."

He admitted that he probably stared at her pretty blankly at her prompting for more movie trivia, and could guess it had to have come out somewhere in the years he'd been out. "Sorry, wish I could say yes, but- I've been out of the world for awhile, I guess you could say."

He realized he had yet to drop her hand and did so with an abashed twist of his lips, and an immediate apology before he considered her next words. "Somewhere else as in still on Earth?" Where he might have taken that for granted before, with the step from one place to another and recent experiences with the otherworldly, he didn't think he could rely on that assumption any longer.

Martha couldn't help but smile at his smile, because it was one of those bright infectious Harkness type smiles--though far, far less all-knowing (and let's be honest, less smug) than Jack's. She shook her head a little at the apology to indicate it wasn't a problem, filing away the 'out of the world for a while' comment for later consideration. Time traveller? Abductee? Hermit? She no longer was sure what was plausible and what wasn't.

"Well, with less movie references this time," she started, "it seems to be on Earth, but people here are from so many different Earths that it may be one all of its own--stop me if I'm getting confusing, I'm too used to this sort of thing--maybe interdimensional? It's hard to say. I know I've been home and back here five times or so since I first arrived, so you're probably not permanently stuck, if that helps."

Edited 2014-03-12 21:31 (UTC)

He had not had time enough to consider the idea that he might have been trapped, that he might have been ripped from his world again with no way to return, but the promise that that was not the case offered no small relief. "It does, actually," he admitted, "So an interdimensional hotel, huh? I have to say...that's new. New to me, anyway."

"You seem pretty used to this kind of thing, if you don't mind me saying." There was a looseness to the way that she held herself that suggested that interdimensional portals, other worlds, the whole lot, they were nothing she hadn't seen before. He would have expected more panic in her eyes or resignation in the line of her shoulders, but could find none of that in her as far as he could see. And then, realizing only belatedly that he had not actually introduced himself properly, he added, "I'm Steve Rogers, by the way."

"It's not something I'm overly acquainted with either, to be honest. At least, not in a hotel." Martha smiled a little, could feel heat rising in her face, but she persevered. She could talk to cute guys if she wanted to, could hold her own, but lately she'd been far less cool about it than usual. Very weird.

"Shifting through time and space, that I can handle okay, actually. It's universe collisions that are new, but a, uh, friend of mine who's more experienced in it all says this place isn't anything to worry about." She extended a hand, settled her gaze on Steve. "Nice to meet you, I'm Martha. Dr Martha Jones."

Having, if not a mission, then at least a new situation to tackle and no apparent expectations that he live up to a name he had been given and only later earned as he believed he had, allowed Steve the freedom to forget that he was absolutely terrible at speaking to any of the female gender. Impersonal and informative was easy, or at least easier than anything else. It allowed him to be friendly without immediately tripping over his boots, and Martha's behavior set him more at ease than anything else.

The mention of time and space had him curious, as well as the fact that she said she knew someone who was experienced in universe collisions. "He wouldn't happen to be Flash Gordon or something, would he?" As pathetic a stab at a joke as that was, it was the closest reference he could come to to space travel that wasn't pointing to Stark or Thor in recent events. And, truth was, Steve had watched every one of those serials and been there week in and week out to find out what happened to Flash and Dale.

He reached out a hand again to take hers for a shake, "Nice to meet you too, Dr. Jones." He smiled, "Glad I could meet a friendly face in all this."

Martha started laughing, probably because her own knowledge of Flash Gordon involved Brian Blessed and a Queen soundtrack--and to be honest, she would have assumed the same for Steve. "He is definitely not Flash Gordon," she supplied. "He's his own man, I don't think I could come up with a movie reference to work for him."

She shook Steve's hand firmly, long enough to be friendly, though she didn't linger too long at least. "You can call me Martha, we don't really do much formality around here. And thank you. It's not so bad, really--if you go up to the desk, they can get you a room. Did...this is going to sound rude, but did you have any money on you when you left, uh, Kansas?"

He had no idea how long it had been since he had had someone laughing at something he said, but not laughing at him. Probably since the last time he had actually tried for a joke, but he couldn't remember when that last was. That she got it at all made him grin, caught up in the moment.

Still, he nodded in understanding. His hand dropped o his side as he listened attentively, focused as her as he had been on every drill camp instructor and General along the way before he had his say. At her question he reached for his back pocket to withdraw his wallet, the leather still too shiny and unworn to seem real, and opened it to finger at the few bills he had inside. "Not much," he admitted, "I have a couple of those...cards?" He caught his thumbnail along the three cards inside the billfold: ID, and those two cards he'd been told were an ATM and credit card, though the concept of the latter made no sense to a boy who'd grown up in the Depression.

The leather looked remarkably smooth, noticeably so--and it added to Martha's ongoing interest in Steve's oddness. Not bad-odd, just slightly...either otherworldly or old-fashioned. "You'll be all right," she said with a soft smile, "as long as you've got money in your bank account for your debit card. Depending on when you can get home next, you might need to buy, uh, a change of clothes."

She flicked her gaze up and down at the very nice yet very dusty leathers.

((Forgive this lateness, I was on a business trip! If you want to FTB, no worries.))

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore

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