all_inclusive | In the last week before the world changed

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In the last week before the world changed

How many hours he had spent exploring the halls and grounds of the Nexus Hotel, Steve was pretty certain he'd lost track. It surprised him to find that he was not climbing the proverbial (or literal) walls with so much time without a mission, although that might have been largely in part to do with Bucky's presence and what he recognized as a half-masochistic desire to take all the time he could with the other man without spilling the beans. Since their days in the orphanage and their meeting in one of the many Brooklyn back alleys he'd been getting beat up in, all until the war, there hadn't been a day he hadn't been sure what Bucky was up to or where Bucky was.

The war had changed that in ways Steve had never anticipated. What had come after had only driven him further apart from those nostalgia-colored memories of a childhood that was, in retrospect, far from grand.

Despite his promise to his friend that he could hitch a ride back with him, if only he could find his door, Steve had avoided much of investigating the many doors of the hotel as he worked out whether or not such a thing were even possible. That he actually wished for a moment that Stark was there to babble at him in his science-speak about dimensions or temporal paradox or whatever else might have been on the menu was a fact he thought he'd best keep to himself. Best forget entirely before he had to think on that for too long.

Instead he had toured the art gallery more than a dozen times, poked around the library, devoted early mornings and late nights when he was unable to sleep in the basement gym. In between times he unnerved the staff at the bistro with the amount of food he could pack away in a sitting, and how many times a day he could come back for a refill and still have that vaguely hungry feeling gnawing at his belly. Just then, with something unsettling and all too vague itching at the back of his neck and weighing at his shoulders, he buried himself in the cheap sketchbook and pencil he'd picked up in the hotel shop, sitting with his back against the wall of the lobby as he idly sketched bits and pieces of the people who passed through on their way to one place or another.

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Martha had always envied people who could draw. It was a skill she didn't have, despite her teachers' best efforts and a bunch of failed lessons from Leo, who did a pretty good job himself. She wasn't quite stick figure bad, but nor was it moving--she'd managed to capture stuff all right in anatomy class but they sure as hell weren't going to use her notes as a textbook.

She tried not to look too closely at Steve's sketchbook (in case it was private, she told herself, but in actuality it was because of the Journal of Impossible Things, which still haunted her a little), as she wandered over to him with a sheepish wave.

"A little less dusty," she said, with a duck of her head in greeting. "It's a good look on you."

The presence of Bucky within the Nexus necessitated an utter lack of reference to the past of all that had come after his friend’s death, and as a result Steve had left all studies of the new New York and of the people he had met in his time after the defrost. Nothing that was not of the Nexus spilled across the pages of his sketchbook for that very reason. It was not because he believed his friend would rummage through his things or anything along those lines, but never in their friendship had there been lines drawn where either of them hadn’t been equally free to poke and question the other over whatever topic came to mind. Why wouldn’t Bucky, if he so wished, be allowed to steal the sketchbook and flip through it out of old habit?

It left Steve’s position over it as he worked idly on the lines of a quick character study of someone across the way unguarded when Martha arrived and spoke to him.

He lifted his head, his pencil angling to the side as he smiled up at her. “Dr. Jones,” he caught himself and tipped his head, correcting it to “Martha. Yeah,” one of his hands lifted to smooth over the back of his neck as he looked down at himself, nodding. “Turns out a shower and a fresh set of clothes’ll do that.” While he thought to return the compliment, he remembered his track record of such things and immediately thought better of it. It was probably better to avoid accidentally insulting the woman, if he could help it. “I hope things have been- well?”

Steve was not above wincing at his own awkwardness.

Martha caught enough of a glimpse (she was curious--okay, nosy--thanks to certain life experiences) to determine that Steve was drawing someone across the room. Though quietly and unobtrusively, and not in a strange way, just...what he saw.

She smiled in agreement, shaking his hand firmly. "Martha," she confirmed. "Not doing much doctoring to really be Dr Jones here, at the moment, and definitely not for friends." Though with his next statement, the last thing she needed was to think about him in a shower, and she blinked the idea away.

"Things have been okay," she said instead, clearing her throat. "Been home and back again, actually. How about you?" She gestured to the sketchbook. "You've got some serious talent, are you a professional artist? If you don't mind my asking."

The slide of the pencil tip across the paper was as soothing as it had always been, unchanged by decades or the breadth of his shoulders. His grip did have to be more careful than in years long past, but enough years in the body that had been given to him had assured that he was long used to more control in every action. The people who were the subject of his study were not of themselves important, although he never would have phrased it as such and honestly did wish to get down even the fleeting sketches of them down to what had caught his eyes about them. A particularly expressive face there, a curious harshness of the set of shoulders there, a laugh that seemed to take up one’s whole body there.

The same control that guided his pencil without snapping the wood in his hands had his fingers curling around hers to shake her hand in greeting. Friends - he could count on one hand how many he had left, and come up with fingers to spare. All of them, in fact, though there was the potential of something in the Avengers, he thought. For now they were allies but not friends, his interactions outside of them limited to those who went to the same gym as him, the people he saw on the subway, and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s collection of agents and technicians who were more likely to gape at him than say hello. He couldn’t say that the prospect of Martha as a friend was an unpleasant one.

He dropped his gaze to the sketchbook across his knees before he gave her something of an abashed smile, “No. Nothing like that.” The thought had occurred before of wondering if he might have been if the war hadn’t intervened, but those were days long gone past and he could no longer imagine a world where he was not a soldier. “I went to school for it, actually,” he admitted after a moment, the distance between the hotel and what he thought of the real world allowing him room enough to speak more easily about it than he otherwise might have. “Back before the war, but it felt like there were more important things to do than learn to paint.”

"Mind if I sit down?" Martha asked, gesturing to the chair next to Steve's, not wanting to impose herself on him. Her gaze dropped to his sketchbook as his did, caught a few more glimpses of people (real people, not so impossible things, though to be honest, most things weren't impossible--just improbable--particularly around here).

"I sort of know the feeling. I wanted to be a baker, for a while," she confessed with a faintly wry smile, "when I was younger, because I thought it'd be fun. Making people happy, delicious food, maybe go to France and learn. I wasn't half bad at biscuits, to be honest." Her smile was soft, a little wry, a little nostalgic. "But I was good at science and then I got into a good secondary and helping people, the doctor thing, seemed more useful, and you know, better money, and I liked it about as well."

“No, no, go ahead,” he waved a hand towards the same chair she had, as if she hadn’t already indicated where she had planned on sitting or there was a question of it mattering where she could sit. He made no move to cover his sketches, though it occurred to him belatedly that some might have thought it strange or intrusive to sketch out strangers from a distance. As she had made no note about it, he figured it was acceptable enough. That maybe it just had to do with sketching out strangers badly in either tone or skill. For all that he could have chosen the architecture of the room to chase the lines of with his pencil, or gone and drawn buildings out of his memory, people seemed better suited to his mood.

“Well,” he told her, a smile pulling at his lips, “You can’t go wrong with cookies.” It was strange how life twisted beyond your plans, going every which way until you could no longer tell which way was up and which was down. Steve nodded after a moment, the smile falling away for more sober thoughts. “It is a noble profession.” Whether the words might have seemed trite or old-fashioned to her, he didn’t know, but he meant every word he said. “I’ve seen the kind of good you doctors can do, and there’s not a time or a place I don’t think your skills could go unappreciated.”

"Thanks," Martha said with a soft smile as she settled down in the chair, tucked a stray piece of hair back behind her ear as best she could. There was something about how Steve was drawing people--observational rather than the kind of gaze that was there to consume, demand, objectify. It was all about that difference, she supposed, that made it okay.

"I reckon there's some way to go wrong with cookies, but I just haven't experienced it at all," she replied, pursing her lips in thought. "And I don't really bake much, these days. That's the thing that happens with this noble profession--" and she wasn't mocking his words but only echoing them, "it ends up taking up way too much time or energy or both. There's no point in baking if you can't put care into it, and it feels like I use most of it up getting from day to day. I wouldn't trade my job, but it doesn't leave a lot of downtime, which is why being here's been a little...weird."

She paused, considered for a moment, then said with a laugh, "Maybe I should offer my services to the kitchen. So, if you don't mind my asking...did you stay a soldier after the war?"

What war it was, she wasn't clear on, or even if it was a war that had ever happened in her world, but Martha was more than used to oblique conversations about people's pasts, and the need to tread lightly.

Steve’s lips quirked, gaze dropping to the sketchbook. “I can understand that.” How often had he had the chance to really more than the faces he had left behind him, the places he had seen that no longer existed or were so changed that he could not recognize them? Even before, with the Commandoes, he had been too often caught up in the mission or the planning the next to remember how to catch the light in something more than dull pencils in the margins of his notebooks. The downtime he’d had in New York had been at once too full and too empty. Too much to catch up on, pressing in on from every side, and yet too empty of anything that had felt the least bit real.

He shook himself from the memory, chasing the thought instead that the battle for New York had changed everything. The Avengers had changed everything.

His brow furrowed for a second before he looked at her, straightening his shoulders as he spoke. “It’s…complicated, but yeah.” He nodded, “Yeah, I did.” The uniform was different, the orders coming from new commanders, and the enemies had changed, but he could not imagine a life where he was not still that soldier. Even as his fingers itched for his shield. “It’s what I’m good at. You could say I was made for it,” the joke was flimsy but he was surprised to find that it was easy to talk to her on a subject that was not. The desire to share some of his history was strange and left him floundering for a moment in how to bring it up in a way that didn’t speak of immediate doom of gloom, but he did finally say, “I’m 93, you know.”

Martha smiled a little, sadly. "Yeah, being a soldier is a lifestyle too, from what I understand." She stretched out her legs a little in front of her, frowning in thought as she did. "I gave it all up, went travelling for a while--but only because I was promised I could come straight back to what I was doing. I'm glad I went, but at the time, there not being an impact...seemed like the most important thing. I know better now, I saw too much to let opportunities pass me by."

She turned at the 'made for it' comment, cocking her head, then her eyes widened a little (but only a little) at his final statement, before she processed it. "Not bad for 93," she said, and rested her elbow on the arm of the chair, and her chin in her hand. "Do you mind if I ask...are you human, or an alien, or...I swear I won't do the doctor thing and poke and prod."

His life had been on display for so long that Steve couldn’t say it wasn’t nice to be able to speak freely to another person and have them not already know it all. Of course, there had been his neighbors and the men at the gym he went to on the regular, but even there he had understood that if they didn’t already know him, or wouldn’t catch the reference of his name, S.H.I.E.L.D. did not want him spreading around who he was. There in the Nexus? Well, S.H.I.E.L.D. had no say in the matter. There he was just a guy talking to a friend, albeit one of the attractive female variety, and what he chose to say or not to her was entirely up to her.

“That was my plan,” he told her. “I had this whole plan of taking my bike and traveling around for awhile. No one looking over my shoulder, no expectations, just seeing as much of the country I could.” His shrug was almost but not entirely careless then, his lips pulling up at the corners. “Funny thing was, I ended up here instead of that diner in Kansas that promised to have some of the best apple pie in the state.”

He ducked his head slightly, feeling as if he were making up the script of what to say as he went along. It wasn’t a bad feeling, just strange. Okay, probably not as strange as invading alien forces and mild-mannered scientists who became green rage monsters, but strange all the same. “Human,” he told her, “And poking and prodding is part of how I got into this mess.” The words, despite how they might have been interpreted, weren’t without humor. Despite all that had happened, and what he had thought was the end turning out only to have been hitting the pause button on a very strange life, he did not regret Dr. Erskine’s work or what it had made him capable of. “The army wasn’t interested in taking me when I was a 90 pound nothing, but you could say that I went through a program that Charles Atlas would’ve been proud of. If, that is, Charles Atlas had had a team of scientists, a genius engineer, and U.S. government funding.”

"And thus, apple pie and Kansas, right," Martha said with a little nod. "Sometimes you do need to just head for the road when there's apple pie along the way." She was being silly but not facetious, and hoped Steve could tell.

"But as for your...uh, transformation and being 93, that's not unheard of, in my book. Not exactly the kind of person you meet every day," unless you're the Doctor, "but considering two of my friends in this very location are an alien and a half-demon, I'd say you've managed to land in a place that won't be particularly judgemental." Martha's lips quirked in a wry smile, but there was determination under it, and in her eyes, that was rock solid, and her next statement was light on the surface but steel underneath--the kind of thing that had experience to back it up. "If anyone is, I'll have to have words with them. Not...not that you can't handle yourself, of course."

“Exactly.” Steve’s smile widened a little more for her then, and while not quite surprised that he was not alone in the thoughts that had driven him to the road, glad all the same that he had found someone, if only for a little while, that understood.

“Really?” The words half burst out of him, despite the fact that it had been proven to him several times over that the world was stranger than he had known. He had come from a world of gods and monsters with gentle men inside them, of magic and technology that blazed well beyond their wildest dreams in the years he had grown up in. If anything had been proven to him in the weeks before he had stepped into the hotel, it had been that his determination that nothing could have surprised him any longer was anything but correct. The hotel had driven him further from that unshakeable stance with Bucky’s presence and Martha’s words then that there were demons among their number (a concept he found vaguely uncomfortable with his childhood as an Irish Catholic), but he found the prospect of more strangeness thrilling rather than oppressive.

He leant back in his seat to watch her as she spoke, caught a moment by the impression that this Doctor Martha Jones was a woman who should not be crossed. His lips quirked at that realization, not out of a humor meant to belittle but out of an admiration he did nothing to hide. “You’re a hell of a dame, Martha,” he told her, “Thank you.” His fingers caught the edge of his notebook before he told he said, gaze even and meaning every word, “The same goes on my end. I don’t doubt that you could handle it on your own, but if you ever need help all you need to do is ask.”

Martha couldn't help but display just a tinge of the bright smile that threatened to burst forth and spread across her face, her-Doctor-like, with pleasure, at the expression of wonder on Steve's face. She'd picked up more than a few traits of her travelling companion along the way, though it was only maybe now that she'd met his latest incarnation, admitted that her Doctor was the past, that she was willing to admit it.

"It's been a while since I was called a dame," she said, and that grin shone through a little more. "But from you I'll definitely take it as a compliment, Steve Rogers." She extended a hand to shake his. "I've found out that it's always good to have help, no matter how good you think you are."

Thor mostly kept to himself in the hotel, spending much of his time with Jane or his brother and it was only through luck that he happened across a familiar face in the hotel lobby this particular afternoon. His first reaction was to be annoyed that he'd tripped over someone but when he saw who it was, he could not help the hearty laugh or the wide smile.

"Captain Rogers! When did you find your way to this particular corner of the universe?"

He had become a comrade-at-arms in New York, someone to trust and be trusted with his life and he had been instrumental in helping to regain the tesseract and stop Loki from destroying Midgard. There was no honor that Rogers did not deserve but, knowing the man, he might refuse any offered to him. "Yours is a face I have wanted to see for a long, long while."

Anyone who knew of New York and their particular circumstances was a welcome person indeed.

The sound of that laugh - great and golden and larger than life - boomed, echoing off the shape of the space around them as if they stood in a theatre or at the top of a canyon. It was a laugh that could have belonged to no one in the world but Thor, Steve was sure of it. It did not matter that they had spent relatively little time in each other’s company when they had not been actively fighting, or worse bickering amongst themselves like misbehaving children (he saw that now, and was ashamed for his part in it). He had had the man at his back in the middle of battle, a distinction that branded him in Steve’s mind as being an ally. Strangers though they still mostly were, his trust in the Asgardian was absolute.

“Thor!” He called back, abandoning his book and pencil to the seat beside him and getting immediately to his feet.

The people Steve had called friends had faded into the history books by the time he had woken from the ice, but there was potential enough in the Avengers and its members for him to be able to see Thor as the potential for a great friend. He was thrown momentarily off-step by the reference to a long time passed, as it had been a few weeks only between their separating in New York, but even with that he was glad enough to see a familiar face that it let the matter slide.

He reached out to shake the other man’s hand, a part of him needing that physical contact as proof that it was not merely another twist in what he wasn’t entirely sure was not a dream. “No idea how I ended up here, actually. One minute I was in Kansas, the next-” he gestured with his other hand. “How long have you been here?”

"For months, now, with a long respite back in Midgard and in my own Asgard to help Jane," Thor explained. The nature of the hotel was such that time did not pass in the manner that it did in Midgard or Asgard and he could lose months and months here with no time passing in either of the worlds he thought of as home.

"It has been nearly a year since New York and since the battle we fought alongside one another. Strange, isn't it? How this place alters time? If I were a learned man, I might study it, but I leave such things to Jane."

“A year?” His brows lifted in surprise. The idea that the other man had gone back to the world and returned wasn’t what knocked him off guard. Martha had spoken to him right off the bat of her stepping between home and the Nexus but he hadn’t thought of the time discrepancy. Sure, Buck alive and well tipped him off that they did not all just come from different worlds, but had that they had been taken from different times as well. He might have thought that was what Thor’s statement had boiled down to, if not for what he had said about the hotel altering time. “It is - strange, that is.”

“Before I walked in here,” he said, “It had only been a couple weeks after the battle of New York.” Where there was a moment there that had Steve wondering if that was how he would have to tell time, or if he had been doing so all along, marking his months and years off by battles and enemies, there were more important matters to consider. “You left with your brother, and I got on my bike and headed west.”

After a second’s curiosity he had to ask, “Have you met anyone else you know? Were they…off in time somehow?”

"My brother has not yet experienced New York," Thor explained. "And knew nothing of his treachery against us. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt but only just...a short leash is probably best."

Things had happened back in Asgard that made him feel that Loki was a worthy ally once more and one that he could trust but trusting Loki meant accepting that he could change and had changed; Thor was not yet willing to entrust his brother with too much in the way of responsibility.

Steve wasn’t sure what that meant. Not that he literally did not understand Thor’s words, or that he had not begin to take in details of the man’s appearance that did not fully back up his having come from a year after himself, but that the idea of Loki having been from before New York had consequences he did not even know how to begin wrapping his head around. Thor had been so quick to defend his brother up until those very last days, only faltering in being reminded of how many people Loki had killed on Earth in what amounted to a single weekend.

“That’s understandable,” he said, taking the leap of faith that the Asgardian having acknowledged that his brother wasn’t to be entirely trusted, and proving that he would not forget what had happened (even if it hadn’t happened yet to Loki…a thought that threatened to give Steve a headache if he had to think about that for too long) would mean that he could rely on Thor’s judgment in the matter.

“I ran into a friend of mine here,” he admitted. The subject of Bucky was one almost more personal than any other, and one that he had not felt comfortable speaking of to anyone else he had met at the hotel. “A friend I lost in the war.”

Edited 2014-04-09 05:55 (UTC)

"I thought that humans did not live so long," Thor said, frowning a little. "Has he too not experienced everything you have experienced?" It seemed to be a common thing with this hotel and Thor wasn't sure how to approach it. He was normally fairly accepting of the unusual and not quick to judge but this place tried his patience with matters like that.

Still, if this was an ally of Steve's, it could be someone that Thor could extend his trust to if things went badly with Loki once more.

None of those he had met in the hotel thus far had been anything but friendly, warm (in manner, if not body temperature) and willing to help him. And yet, as he stood there beside the Asgardian he had fought beside only weeks ago, there seemed to be none he could speak to more freely than Thor. Theirs was an alliance that felt as if it could bleed easily into the friendship shared by all those who had become comrades-in-arms, and while he did not think Stark or some of the others would have understood it, he thought that on the level of one soldier to another, Thor would understood what he meant.

It was in the directness of the other man’s gaze and the open honesty of his speech that allowed Steve to speak to him of things that could not go beyond the two of them, not anything he had read in the man’s S.H.I.E.L.D. file or information he had been given secondhand.

“No, we don’t.” That was easy enough, as while his own mortality (or at least the length of it) was something of a question mark according to Erskine’s words, the basic human lifespan was not up for questioning. “He-” his voice broke, brows furrowing as he searched for what might explain it best or how he might say it in a way that would hurt the least. “He died in that war, Thor. I was there, he- he fell.”

"And yet he stands here, still healthy and hale," Thor said, musing out loud as he tried to understand yet another of the hotel's particular quirks. It was an unusual place but, as he had experienced more and more over the last few years, Thor's life in general had become very, very unusual.

"Is he sound of mind or is he having trouble understanding this place? It is disorienting to go from one place to another and to go from dead to alive, though I suppose I do not have to tell you that. It is something those of us who fought together probably understand better than most."

Thor mused and Steve found himself nodding along, the fact of Bucky’s presence in the hotel one that had become one that more or less defined the whole of his stay. He had heard so much about the doors that studded the walls of the place and led to worlds he could not have touched in any other way, and yet he had held himself back from every doorway for fear of crossing into some place that his friend could not follow. He had sought out as much of the man’s time as he could manage without raising suspicions, and hated every second he hid the truth from the same man who he had known nearly all his life, who had been with him every step of the way and who had never failed to have his back. Whether it had been a back alley in Brooklyn, or through a sniper scope in Switzerland.

“He seems…bored, actually.” It was said not without humor, as Steve could never not smile even a little when he thought of his friend and the distinctive pout on his face while he was stuck drinking and flirting with every woman he came across (although Steve was sure he hated that). Even as he himself worked to memorize every detail, every expression, every drawl of the other man’s voice in knowing how soon he would lose him again, the joy of being around his friend once more overwhelmed all else. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here, Thor,” he confessed after a moment. “What I’m supposed to tell him. Whether I should stay.”

The reference before to Loki having come before New York had him asking aloud, “Have you told your brother? What happens?”

"I have told him. We fought bitterly about it, as he claims he has no knowledge of New York and what happened there. I also told him about my mother's death, our mother's death, and it seems to have mended the rift somewhat."

Thor wished he knew how to bridge the gap between he and Loki but it seemed impossible. There was too much bad blood and betrayal, seemingly on both sides, and Thor had always had trouble seeing things from a point of view that was not his own. He had always been blinded by his own opinion and sense of morality.

Where he had heard nothing of Thor's mother or what state she was in at the time of New York, nothing beyond the insinuation in Thor's file that his kind were extremely long-lived, there was no answer to that statement but the one that Steve gave then. "I'm sorry," he said, reaching out to place a hand on the other man's shoulder in a display of empathy that was anything but faked. Whether it had been through a long, drawn out illness as his own mother's death had been, or a sudden event, he understood the pain of having lost a mother all too well.

The years that had passed had only lessened the pain with distance, but never erased it.

"With the time that's between us and them," he said after a moment, searching through his memory for anything he might have read or heard to do with time travel and coming up scarce beyond 1941, "Do you think we could change it? That we could warn them?"

Then, after a moment more, "Or even that we should?"

"Changing the course of events might cause more problems," Thor said, mulling that over. "Things are meant to occur in a specific sequence. To interrupt it, to change it, even to save someone - it might bring on Ragnarok or something worse."

It could end up being the death of all of them later and perhaps more sinister and Thor didn't want to take the risk.

He had heard of Ragnarok while hunting Schmidt down all those years ago. The stories he had heard were more likely to be copies of copies of anything Thor knew, and as such far from reliable, but it did not take much clarity on the subject to understand that bringing down Ragnarok on their heads was not what he wanted to do.

He nodded after a moment, face solemn but calm. "I understand."

"It is something I have struggled with long and hard," Thor admitted. It seemed easier to admit weakness to Steve if only because he had the sort of caring warmth that made things feel safe; Thor did not often let down his guard emotionally unless it was to show anger. Never uncertainty or fear, that was for certain.

"But it is for the best because I have to think of the others who reside in Asgard and Midgard and not just myself."

No matter the confusion over his own life and the question of Bucky of past and present, Steve still reached out to lay a hand on the other man's shoulder. There didn't seem to be anything he could say, nothing to say, and what could not be spoken in words could be better communicated with a squeeze of his hand at Thor's shoulder and an evenness of his gaze as he nodded.

Thor could see why people looked to Steve as a leader. He had the qualities that all good warriors had and then some, something deeper. Thor broke his melancholy for a moment to smile at the other man.

"It is good to have someone who understands."

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In the last week before the world changed

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