In the last week before the world changed

[captain_rogers]

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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[captain_rogers]

“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.”

[legendthatwas]

"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.

[captain_rogers]

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.”

[legendthatwas]

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."

[captain_rogers]

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.”

[legendthatwas]

"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."

[captain_rogers]

“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.”

[legendthatwas]

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."