all_inclusive | Dude looks like a lady

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Dude looks like a lady

While the thought of Bucky and the continued fruitlessness of his search for the man weighed heavy on him, there was little different in the routine Steve had taken up in being reintroduced to the hotel. Rising at dawn for a quick, but calorie-laden breakfast, the usual morning run out on the grounds for endurance, time in the gym for strength and flexibility, followed by the insistent growl of his stomach that demanded he rush through his shower before heading back to the Bistro for a second breakfast. All simple, already familiar, and done before nine in the morning.

What was neither simple nor familiar was what happened when he stepped out of the shower with no thought other than that he needed to towel off and dress before he could go out and public to sate the near constant hunger in his belly. He dried his hair with a quick scrub of a towel, wrapped the towel around his hips and padded through the door between bathroom and bedroom with every intention of following exactly that plan. He did not, however, intend on stumbling, thrown suddenly off balance by the length of his legs and the width of his hips and the entirely unfamiliar balance of his body.

He crashed unceremoniously to his hands and knees, shaking his head against the disorientation only to find a cloud of blonde hair in his face. Even as he swept it back with a pass of his hand, wondering at the length of that hair as it fell long past his shoulders, he found himself staring at the delicate and most assuredly feminine hands he held out before him.

Steve looked down at his body as he knelt on the floor, only to just as suddenly jerk his head back up as he flushed red with embarrassment, pulling at the towel around his (too round) hips until it covered him more...more, just more. He didn't want to think of what or how it covered him. There he scrambled for his clothes, hurriedly trying to find something of the too large, wrongly fitted things that could fit over the shape of this too body. A shirt that fell to the top of his thighs and swamped him, a pair of boxers rolled at the waist to fit less precariously, a leather jacket he zipped up over the unfamiliar terrain of his chest, and Steve rushed out the door in the hopes of finding someone he knew or someone who could fix...whatever this was.

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Ed had his daily routine now. Every morning, he went around the hotel and tried to make three new doors in three new spots. No more, no less. He could have spent the entire time he was in the hotel making doors -- made doors until it drove him insane. But he knew that was pointless. So, he had picked the arbitrary number of three and tried to make himself stick to it. Some days were better than others -- although, to be fair, he hadn't surpassed ten doors in one day yet.

Some of the doors he event went in. They went to some neat places. Some he avoided, because they looked ominous on the surface.

The last door of today proved to be different. As it was his last door for the morning, Ed took a few curious steps inside -- and instantly regretted it. He could feel the instant the center of balance on his body shifted, an always unwelcome change. He was reminded abruptly of learning to walk on his automail leg. He stared down at himself -- at his chest. A deep flush instantly surged across his face.

Without thinking, he pushed off his suddenly too big red jacket, his gloves falling off his hands. Abruptly, he was just in his tank top and pants -- he stared at his automail arm, the metal glistening up at him. Even it felt different. Lighter, the hand gone smaller to match his flesh one.

"What the hell," Ed exclaimed, stumbling back out of the room -- and promptly collided with someone else.

The lowered center of gravity would have been disorienting on its own, but paired with the confusion over how he could have suddenly lost muscle mass for female curves (among other things lost and gained) and the distracting jubbliness of his body with every step, Steve had anything but his usual grace. There had been no Vita-Rays, no Serum scientifically applied and activated in sheer agony, and yet he stumbled and weaved with a total lack of understanding of how to work the alien shape of new bones and sleek muscle in anything like efficiency.

The loss of half his body mass and half a foot in height should have made something of the transformation more familiar, or at least allowed him coordination enough to make it to Natasha or Thor, or even to Martha, with her physician's knowledge. It did not, and he did not.

He found himself weaving down the hallway, nonplussed by the shift and sway of his hips as he forced himself to shorten his steps for fear of being thrown too off balance to continue forward in any manner than landing him flat on his face. The matter was complicated by the fall of his hair in his face to obscure his view every time he attempted to look down at his feet to better place them, the focus of coordination and thought required devouring his spatial awareness whole.

The crash of another body into his sent him sprawling, perhaps more for the disruption of his concentration and suddenness of the event than for the actual force behind the collision. It took him a second to realize that the high, surprised noise he heard had actually come from himself, much to his chagrin, and left him apologizing before he had so much as untangled himself from the other person or even noting that the body that had hit him was that of another blond woman.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry."

Ed hit the ground, landing somewhere near the other woman. The collision with the ground was enough to clear his head for a moment, enough for him to take a step back and take a deep breath. It certainly was upsetting that such a chance had happened so instantaneously -- and yeah, it was weird as hell. But weird as hell things happened in this hotel, and he was used to having his body dismantled and then put together again (as disturbing as it was to try and hedge it in that context). So. It just meant he needed to remantle. So to say.

"Yeah, yeah, me too," Ed answered -- and all his logic flooded back out the window when he heard how high-pitched his voice was. He could hear his own inflections, still, but his voice reminded him distinctly of Winry's now.

Reflexively, his automail arm went up near his throat, metal fingers hovering over where his Adam's apple should have been. He swallowed unevenly. Not for the first time, he wished his brother was here. Alphonse would know what to do.

Recognizing the lifted pitch of his own voice, the echo of which he could no longer feel in his chest, came second place to the realization that with the gain of certain...assets, he had lost something rather integral. A piece of himself he had rather liked, no matter Stark's (either of them) insinuation that it had gone unused for too long and was bound to fall off without use.

That loss in and of itself would have had him carding his hands through his hair (too long, his hair was far too long), but as he stood and looked at the person he had run into (or had run into him, which one was rather a mess at the moment), the feeling of disorientation only increased. In any other situation his embarrassment might have gone tenfold at realizing that he had bounced off of a shapely and gorgeous woman, but then and there with things ten kinds of awry and the woman having a right arm of metal, things were not so easy as simply blushing at having tripped over his own feet.

Oh, there was that as well, as it pinked his cheeks in embarrassment for his lack of coordination, but there were greater concerns of the moment. "I wasn't looking where I was going, I'm so sorry," he said, trying and failing to ignore the pitch of his voice, just as he tried and failed to keep from looking at the woman's arm.

It was nothing like the arm he had seen Bucky wear, nothing like the photographs in the file that Natasha had passed him, and yet its existence was a reminder of another place and another mission. "Are you okay?"

Ed pushed himself back up to his feet, and it was still weird to feel how much his center of balance had shifted. How in the world did Winry manage with this? He brushed his hands over his pants, trying to steady himself himself. He couldn't help but notice how tight his pants had gotten in the thighs and the hips. It was ... distracting, he supposed.

"Yeah, I'm all right," Ed managed to say, figuring that it wasn't all together untrue. He wasn't injured at the very least. Just ... not in his right body. Kind of.

"You?" Ed asked, tone brusque, looking back up at the woman.

No sooner had he asked the question did he realize that the other woman was looking at his automail arm. Right. People here weren't used to that sort of thing.

"It won't bite, I promise," Ed tacked on wryly, flexing his right arm upward, left hand balanced on his bicep for a moment, as if to demonstrate that it moved just like a regular arm -- which, for the most part, it did. Except that he could also use it as a weapon with his alchemy.

As well acquainted as he was with injuries great and small, Steve knew the routine of checking for bumps and bruises and while the body he then inhabited was three dimensions of wrong-fitting, he could tell with a little maneuvering that he was none the worse for wear. It was, as yet, the only advantage he could find in his having been reshaped, that at the very least he had not been given a body as fragile as the one he had worn for the vast majority of his waking life. Fond though he had been of that body, it had been too riddled with injuries and illness to be a comfortable alternative to the one Erskine's serum had gifted him with.

"Well, I, uh..." how exactly he was supposed to explain that he seemed to be fine but was having a little difficulty with the 'he' part of that equation. The then too-long sleeves of his leather jacket fell up slender wrists as he tried to clear his hair from his face, toes curling against the floor with a self-consciousness that came with remembering he had pulled on clothes that had gone from tailored to fit to a swamp of fabric.

The sight of the arm moving and flexing would have been enthralling all on its own, the Starks' commentary on his engineering knowledge aside, there was something of the same curiosity over a novel thing as had struck him at that very first Stark Expo. What held him, however, and had him pulling back in embarrassment for having been caught staring at the woman's arm, perhaps even making her self-conscious as he feared he might've, was that echo of Winter Soldier in his thoughts. "No, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have stared. I- my friend has one like it."

"Your friend has an automail limb?" Ed echoed in surprise. This far, everyone had been surprised to see what passed for his prosthetic limb. He'd taken it as a sign that automail, for whatever reason, had only evolved to the level that it had in his own world. He didn't know if that meant this stranger was also from Amestris -- or had traveled there at some point.

"The Rockbells are my mechanics," Ed said, and maybe there was a hint of hopefulness in his voice that he'd found someone who occasionally knew what he was talking about. Winry had gained enough notoriety for her designs lately that it was possible that someone who knew something about automail may have known of her.

Despite Ed's fixation on automail -- a strange sentence for him to even hear his own head as he usually didn't care about automail in the slightest -- there seemed to be something else off about this interaction. Maybe it was a bit from the way the girl was moving paired with how her clothes didn't fit at all, but suddenly Ed couldn't help but burst out, "You're not usually a girl either, are you?"

Steve felt unaccountably guilty in the face of that hopefulness, wanting to do anything but disappoint the woman, for all the fact that she was a strange (and that the world was very, very strange in that moment). But with the only other option being to lie to the stranger, he was left to answer with nothing less than honesty.

The shake of his head came with a touch of annoyance as his hair fell again in his face, but already catching the habit of brushing his hair back out of his face, he dealt with it with no more than a second's pause before he continued. "Sorry, no, I didn't mean...automail? Not exactly anyway, I'm not all that clear on the mechanics myself." For every line blacked out in Bucky's file, there were two of technical jargon he did not understand himself. Strange mechanics built on a science that was cobbled together of Hydran tech and Zola's madness.

Where he never would've wished the confusion of having traded in one gender (or was it sex, the lines between the two were more blurred in the modern day) for another on someone else, he was not about to deny that he was relieved to hear that he wasn't alone in that particular boat. "Yes!" A beat, and then he shook his head. "I mean, no. Not usually a woman, no. Is this- is this normal here now? I've been gone awhile."

"Yeah, well," Ed said with a shrug, "Automail seems to be mostly from my world. Not a big surprise."

He couldn't even really blame Steve on not knowing the mechanics. Ed was pretty useless when it came to his own arm -- and it was his arm. Still, even if it weren't for having someone from home, it would have been nice to have someone who knew something about his arm here. He didn't like the idea of being without it if something happened, but so far nobody had surfaced with any mechanic knowledge. Mostly, he forced himself not to fret over it. Nothing he could do about it now.

"Normal?" Ed scoffed. "Not that I'm aware of. I'm pretty new myself, though. Name's Ed." He tacked on the last part as he held out hand in greeting.

The fact that it was not his first experience reorienting himself in new rules of biomechanics, in a vastly restructured skeleton and differing muscle attachments (or at least the strength of those attachments) made the situation doubly strange. His transformation before had come at the price of agony so intense he had, for all his attempts to control it, passed out from it. This transformation had come with no pain, no scientific team, no injections of either antibiotics or the combination of radiation and chemicals he hadn't half understood.

He had a hard enough time understanding how exactly he was supposed to stand with his skeleton feeling as if it had been stretched wider and shorter in some dimensions, and narrower and longer in others.

He reached out a hand to shake that of the other man's, "Steve. Steve Rogers."

Frigga knew that most of the people did not dress as she expected -- rather, Asgard was not quite the fashion here, and so Frigga had adapted the best she could, turning to more simpler fabric and a blander cut to her clothing. Yet, when a young lady suddenly appeared in the hallway, looking quite frenzied, Frigga couldn't help but be surprised by her disheveled appearance. A different fashion sense was one thing, but this seemed quite another.

Frigga didn't hesitate though. She had no idea what was happening, but she'd always had an innate reaction when seeing others distraught: help.

"Are you hurt?" Frigga asked right away, crossing the small distance between herself and the young woman. That always seemed to be the best information to ascertain first -- that, and if she was being pursued. Frigga rested a gentle hand on the girl's arm -- light enough that she hopefully wouldn't feel confined, but present enough that hopefully it would steady her. Frigga also smiled gently, trying to reassure her that she was safe.

The coordination required to simultaneously maneuver new legs attached to new hips, with an entirely off center-of-balance, and scrape back the sudden length of his hair from his face where it threatened to perpetually fall, was ridiculous. Steve remembered all too well what it felt like to trip over his own limbs in the rush of transformation and go stumbling into cars, walls, and (in one memorable case) through the window of a bridal shop, leaving him forcing himself to slow as he moved down the hallway.

Confusion had him whipping his head around in search of that voice, the suddenness of his own action threatening to knock him off the balance he had only tentatively gained, before he managed to right himself again. "Hurt?" he echoed, eyes already wide going wider as he heard the sound of his own voice. It was too high, too female, and too strange to think of as belonging to him. "I'm not going to say hurt, but I'm having a really weird day."

What felt suspiciously like panic uncoiled slightly at the touch at his arm, the older woman and her smile radiating a maternal warmth that he would have been the first to admit he might have needed in that moment. "Do you-" he began, pausing as he searched for the right words. "I wouldn't happen to be a girl right now, would I?"

"You do happen to be a girl right now," Frigga answered. "Is that not your usual state?"

It certainly didn't sound like it -- not from the assertion that this was a weird day, and not from the confusion that stemmed over what sex the individual in front of her was. Of course, Frigga had little way of knowing precisely where this confusion came from. In a hotel such as this, there were many different answers. She wouldn't put it beyond somebody here having the ability to flip sexes. However, there also seemed to be the likelihood that the hotel had some power over that as well. Frigga didn't fully understand how the power of the hotel worked -- only that it was strong. So, in her mind, it had full range for the time being. She couldn't rule out the potentiality of any such thing.

Still, it wasn't an injury, and in many ways, this was easier to deal with. It meant calming the girl -- or person? -- in front of her down, and then tracking her steps backward to see if there was anything to be done to reverse it.

As far as he could tell in the immediate shifting of his senses of everything of his surroundings and the body he stood in then, Steve could see nothing inherently dangerous or threatening. It should not have, then, incited a faint beat of panic in his veins that drew his eyes wide and had him having to fight the urge to reach for the woman before him with both hands and cling to her for a reason other than the desire to avoid falling over himself again.

He had known the harsh realities of war, fought for his life, the lives of his men, and those who could not fight for himself, hijacked Hydra tanks, submarines, stood toe to toe with both a literal Hydra beast and the friend he had lost so long ago. All should have left him immune to panicking at having found himself a woman, the situation he was sure one that might still prove to be laughable in retrospect. After all, whatever else might have been said about him, Steven Grant Rogers was known for being calm under fire.

"No," he shook his head, startled again at the hair that fell in his face with that vehement movement, pushing it out of his way with both hands. "I'm Captain Steve Rogers. I'm usually-" he waved his hands in half-frantic fluttering movements to indicate his body before he dropped them to his sides. "-taller."

Frigga couldn't help but gently tuck his hair behind his hair when it persisted in falling in his face, although she suspected that might have closer than many people would be comfortable with.

"Ah," Frigga said when he began to explain what had happened. She supposed it would be rather upsetting to find one in another body unexpectedly.

"I'm Frigga," she replied gently, fingers light against Steve's jaw just for a moment, another point that was intended to bring comfort and to hopefully anchor him against whatever was happening.

"Do you wish to sit?" she asked, assuming that a moment to breathe and to get some clarity would probably be helpful in this situation.

Steve did not startle or flinch away from the fingers that reached out to touch him so familiarly, the wide-eyed confusion of the moment failing to overwhelm the recognition of the maternal cast of that touch. It had been a habit of his mother's to do the same when he had been a little boy, the memory of her fingers stroking over his forehead and through his hair having dimmed not in the slightest for all the years that had passed since he had been that child feverish and unhappy in his bed.

Frigga? Faint recognition rang with the name, though Steve was sure he had never met the woman himself before, his brows furrowing as he tried to remember where he had heard that name. Oh! Frigga.

"You're Thor's mother," he announced, voice pitching high as the pieces slotted together in his head. The Asgardian had only referred to her as 'Mother' in their talks before, but her name had been in the bare-bones file Coulson had given him on what they knew of Thor and Loki. Or, far more likely, what filtered information the felt he had needed to know at the moment.

"Sitting." He nodded after a second's consideration. "Sitting would be good."

"I'm Thor's mother," Frigga confirmed, a hint of curiosity in her voice. Of course, such information could be gleaned from Midgardian myth, but the way this Captain Rogers' said it was more familiar. "You know my son?" Frigga asked, unable to help herself.

Of course, she knew Sif and the Warriors Three, but beyond that, she didn't know of the friends and allies Thor or Loki made in the years that followed. She'd met Jane, and that had been a wonderful surprise. She suspected that this Captain Roger was also of Midgard, which did make Frigga wonder how much time Thor spent there. Perhaps sentiments between the worlds had changed; as it was when she was from, Asgard had devoted herself largely to isolation.

Frigga smiled when Steve confirmed that he wanted to sit. She tucked a hand lightly underneath his elbow and began to walk, guiding Steve to the nearest clustering of seats.

Where he had never met the woman himself, having heard of her only from what little Thor had said of the subject (the man boomed, but there had been much to say and very little time to have done it in before they'd been separated again), he knew her. Knew of her, at least.

That recognition felt as if it steadied the ground beneath his feet, if only a little. The strange set of his hips and his knees and his...well, his everything, made the short walk to a seat all the more bizarre, his previous haphazard speed having allowed him to ignore exactly how out of control his body felt. Leaving off worrying about the hows and the whys of the transformation for focusing on getting a handle on the sheer mechanics of things and the one thing he did understand in that moment, i.e. Thor's mother, seemed like the thing to do.

"Yes," he said, sitting carefully down on one of the chairs. The action of which felt far more precarious than it should have, but he ignored that fact for the moment. "We're friends, we fought together in New York."

"New York?" Frigga echoed, the words unfamiliar to her. She knew that the young man's problem should probably take precedence at the moment, but as he was willing to converse about something else, Frigga took up the string of conversation.

After all, she wasn't entirely certain what Steve was referring to. She had put together that Thor had occupied other realms more than she had expected, but she was still realizing the extent of his travels. Admittedly, her son was young when she was from, but it was still a bit of a surprise to hear that he did battle with someone from Midgard. Perhaps more troubling was exactly who they could have been battling against. The last time they had gone to war for Midgard, it was against the Jotun, and that had been a grievous war.

She could only hope that truce lasted.

It was not a belated recognition of the delicacy he would need in discussing how he had met Thor that Steve spoke with, but with a care and understanding he would not shrug off for the world. What crimes he knew her son guilty of were not ones he felt the least bit comfortable revealing to her, if she did not already know. That alone would have made him choose his words carefully, but added to the remembered moment two years in his past of Thor speaking of his mother's death, he wanted nothing but to keep from offending her.

"An alien army invaded our world," he told her, choosing a tact that would not require him to lie to the woman but still explain something of what had happened to bring a prince of Asgard into a battle on Earth. Even had deceit been anything he had been comfortable with, let alone the least bit skilled in, he would have shied back from lying to the mother of a friend. The woman carried within her a glowing warmth he could not help but react to, memories of his own mother long left unexamined but then riding the surface of his thoughts beside recent memory. "Thor came to retrieve some lost power of Asgard, and helped us fight off the army. Without him we could not have won without losing far more than we already had."

"He is a good man."

After everything she had gone through the past few days, Sif still wasn't sure if she was getting used to being in a man's body, or even whether she liked it or not. It was strange, for sure, and perhaps it would never stop being so. The evidence that this place was rubbing off on her was that at least, she was no longer fretting about being stuck. If all people told her about this hotel was true, she would eventually exit through a door her fair maiden self. Though of course maiden was an erroneous term. There were two reasons that made her anxious for the return of her old self: going back to Asgard as she had vowed to do once a week at worst, and more carnal exploits. After careful exploration Sif had decided that men were lacking in ways to receive pleasure, although as she had yet to find herself a partner to experiment with, she couldn't be sure that her conclusion was completely correct. She doubted it wasn't, however.

Had she the power to, she would make Ruby and Natasha her champions based on their help in this trying time alone. It was curious that her first foray into Midgardian clothing was as a man, but she was growing accustomed to the denim breaches, and she knew to look wonderful in her white sleeveless top and black leather jacket. Ruby had a keen fashion sense, not to mention an eager disposition that pleased Sif. Or perhaps it was the constant compliments on her looks, despite them being the male looks. No, Sif decided, it was her pleasant nature. It was all in one. Ruby was a good young woman, and a good friend.

She was strolling down the hall wearing her new items of clothing, absorbed into these thoughts of her new friends, when out the corner of her eye she saw somebody rushing out a door in a way that seemed oddly familiar. Sif stopped in her tracks, observing how the frankly stunning woman wore ill-fitting clothes and no shoes, and raised an eyebrow. Oh dear, she thought, but not wanting to rush to unwanted conclusions she approached the blonde lady with care. "Pardon me my lady, are you in need of assistance?"

The last time he had been stumbling on new limbs and bare feet, Steve had expected to have been given a new body. The parallels between that frantic chase through Brooklyn streets and his attempting to make it from his room to anyone who might have answers (or, at the very least, clothes that might fit so he could move without worrying that he might lose his shorts) were hardly lost on him, Although he could say that at least he had not lost someone to a violent and undeserved end in the process.

Having never been anything but all skin and bones or, more recently, all muscle and sinew, the sensation of being in a body of feminine curves that bounced and swayed with every movement was more than a little alarming. It made him wonder, even in the midst of his confusion and something he wasn't too proud to realize might have been a little like panic, how women managed to be as efficient and capable as he knew many of them were with such distracting sensations. How could they not be hyper aware of their own bodies when they were not built of solid lines and hard planes.

He had paused, scraping back the length of his hair from his face with both hands, feeling all too awkward in that new bone structure and contemplating the shape of his hips, when he heard the deep make voice speak. It took a second to realize that he was the one being addressed, leaving him blinking in no little confusion before that realization set in and he turned back from looking over his shoulder to see what woman was being spoken to.

"I am having," he said with a heavy sigh, dropping his hands to his hips before having to resist his hands to actually curl around the wider shape of them. "The strangest day."

It had not escaped Sif that the lady in front of her seemed to be observing herself quite the same way she had felt her own new body only a few days ago. She looked about as bewildered as Sif herself had been and given she had not been the only one this had happened to it was more than a little curious. This could be no coincidence. Especially because at first, she seemed to not think Sif was addressing her.

Once the lady replied Sif paused to consider whether or not to comment on the staggering beauty of her face, immediately deciding this poor person (man or woman) needed none of that nonsense at the moment. She feared her reply had been an understatement, if it was indeed that she was having the same sort of day Sif had had upon receiving a burly, taller, sharper lined body. "I apologize for the question in advance, my friend, but would you happen to be a man? Or have been one, physically, until very recently? Minutes perhaps?" Momentarily Sif couldn't help but imagine what this person looked like as a male. No less pleasant, surely.

How much of his attention was devoted by the twin goals of coordinating his limbs and attempting to ignore the breasts that lay beneath his shirt, and failing both in equal measure, left nothing of his attention to wondering exactly how he had been turned into a woman, our even whether the shape change was one temporary or permanent. Breasts and the ability to think straight had never gone well together. Apparently not even then being his, for the moment, had changed that equation.

He stared at the (other?) man with something like relief as any thought that might have risen in his having to argue the point of his gender was put to rest before it could do much as settle. "Yes!" He looked a second abashed as the word had burst from his lips, taking a breath before he nodded and continued in a more even tone. "That's exactly what happened. How'd you know?"

While Sif doubted this would make the woman - man - in front of her feel any better, from what little she could see of her breasts they were worth limb discoordination and a scattered mind. Of course she made no mention of it out loud, as that would be unhelpful and lecherous of her. She had to be thankful that her good sense remained intact even with a man's body.

The expression of relief on this poor sod's face earned him a smile of commiseration out of Sif, who put a much too large hand on his shoulder, squeezing with what she hoped was moderate force. "Because, my good man, I am a woman." She replied, smile turning humorless. "I stepped out of my room one evening, and lo, I was a man. We are not the only two to whom this has happened, either."

The acknowledgement that he wasn't hallucinating it, as far as he could tell, did nothing to temper Steve's embarrassment over having found himself in a shapelier, smaller body than he had showered in, but that the man standing across from him understood was relief enough to allow him to forget for a moment that he was standing in clothes that were in no way suitable for that body.

No matter how the jacket fell loose across his shoulders and hung over his hands enough to have been more than a little annoying had he been thinking in more than emergency terms.

Overpowering though his relief was, even allowing him to smile for a moment in reply to the man's words, the disorienting need to look up to meet his eyes aside, it faded somewhat as the stranger continued. "One evening?" That sounded nothing like 'just now' or 'I promise, it's temporary and will never happen again' and was as such dragging questions in the wake of those words. Only-

Steve had no more than opened his mouth to ask a question when the puzzle pieces slid together into something like a picture. That cadence of speech, the formality of those words, the dark hair and hazel eyes put into the context of belonging to a woman, rather than the man he...she was then. "...Sif?"

Embarrassment wasn't something Sif traded in, generally, and so she only found herself discomfited by her newly acquired body because of how unsubtle it was in its reactions to certain stimuli. And, apparently, those happened often. She had not been conscious of this before, perhaps because as a woman Sif perceived those stimuli mentally rather than physically - most of the time, anyway. It still wasn't embarrassing, more...unusual. Uncomfortable. As unsubtle as her fighting style.

The man-with-a-female-semblance's question, his expression, only gave Sif an apologetic one. She had tried not to concern herself with how long this would last, if not forever. Sif had told herself that the hotel was a tricky thing, prone to mischief as Loki in his best years, but it was momentary. It ought to be. Oh, she hoped it was. "Roughly a week ago, yes." It was so long. Even Sif was starting to let panic dominate her slightly upon realizing.

It wasn't often that Sif saw someone piecing thoughts together in their minds without knowing that was what was happening. People got a distinct look about them then - furrowed brow, mouth agape, wide eyes - and this not-quite-a-lady had all the signs. The silence gave it away as well. Upon hearing her name from such a mostly unfamiliar face, Sif regarded the lady carefully, eyes narrowed. It stood to reason that the coloring - if not the facial shape entirely - was the same despite translation; however, this did not sound like Thor upon speaking, and he was reacting in a much less violent outrage than Thor would if such a thing happened to him. Furthermore, Sif had not met many men she had not known before in this place, and only one of them was blond and on good terms with her.

"Captain?" She finally called, one eyebrow arched.

Edited 2014-04-28 22:06 (UTC)

Without time enough to take a breath and attempt to figure out what had happened to him, how it had happened, or even what he felt about being remade into the shape of a woman, Steve had to admit that he hadn't yet thought of whether or not the change was permanent. The woman-in-male-shape's answer set nothing of his mind to ease on the latter question.

Imagining even a week of being in the softer shape he stood in then was hard to grasp, the thought that he had nothing that fit a woman' body the first (semi-illogical) fear that came to mind. Then came the consideration that the center-of-balance of his body made female was all wrong, his shoulders far too narrow, muscles sleek lines rather than bulk, pelvis too wide to walk in a familiar pattern, let alone manage the fluidity of movements as he was used to running through them. His head spun with the implications, the questions of whether he could defend himself if he needed to, of whether his enhanced metabolism or healing had been mitigated or full out nullified.

Oh god, and then there was the need to shower. Color crept into his cheeks at the thought and had him wishing distractedly that his family had had a little less Irish blood in its background.

Recognizing the Asgardian woman no matter her form was a touch more relief the situation was in dire need of, and while it meant that nothing of the situation was resolved, he knew he was not alone in it. He nodded emphatically, paused to brush his hair back out of his face, and answered. "Yes!"

Sif had lived countless years, she had lived through ages - not a hyperbole, actual ages - and amidst the numerous things she had had to consider and adapt to, switching genders had never crossed her mind. There were no contingency plans in the back of her mind, and thus none to offer the Captain. She could imagine it was as off-throwing to him as it was to her, in any case. Noticing the sudden heat rising to the Captain's face, Sif's brow furrowed in worry. "Are you well?" She felt his forehead with the back of her hand. "Within reason, I mean."

The way his hair fell over his face as he nodded made Sif's lips curve slightly into a smile. "Remind me to lend you a hair-tie." She told him. Upon his final and verbal admittance to being who she thought he was, Sif's smile grew, and she squeezed his delicate shoulder again with the hand already on it. "Oh, Captain." She sighed in sympathy. "This provides you no comfort but you are as impressive in your lady's body as you are in your man's one." It needed to be said.

Steve had thought he had grown out of the habit of blushing, but it seemed as if he had only managed to stifle in in his own body, not in the new strange chemistry of the one he stood in then. He blinked as Sif laid a hand on his forehead, eyes feeling as if they could not go any wider before he attempted to rein in something of his reaction. "No, no, I mean- sure, yeah. Fine."

He registered with something like relief that there wasn't that same knee-jerk reaction to this Sif's smile as he had gotten from Sif as a woman. Not for, even he had to scramble to think, a fear that he might've...expanded his territory, so to speak, but as he did not think he could deal with the bottom of his stomach dropping out on him just then on top of everything else. The idea that flickered through his thoughts for a second of what his reaction might have been had he run into Sif's other form made him blink, unsure if he was more confused or intrigued by the concept.

And there, had he thought he could not have felt more awkward in that moment, receiving Sif's compliment about him as a woman (and the connection of him as a man) certainly put that foolish notion to rest. "Uh, thanks? I mean, thank you. You're very-" he waved a hand toward Sif and her broad-shouldered and extremely masculine body as she stood over him (and wasn't that strange, having to look up to meet her eyes) before finishing lamely, "-handsome."

Steve sighed, wondering if he wouldn't be better off just crawling back into bed and hiding from the world until the whole...woman-thing wore off. Tempting though the thought was, the loud grumble of his stomach and the belated reasoning that he still would need to find suitable clothes crossed that option off the list. "Do you think you could help me find some clothes?" He pulled at the bottom hem of his shirt, then added "That fit?"

For her part Sif made an effort to only fluster in the heat of battle - or by having the blood of her enemies splattered upon her cheeks. Anything else was unacceptable and juvenile, though her skin's coloring certainly seemed reluctant to abide. She only realized that the heat on the Captain's cheeks was no fever but embarrassment of sorts well after she had removed her hand from his forehead. Stiffening a laugh, Sif nodded, satisfied with his answer.

While the Captain might have no strange sensations upon seeing her, the same could not be said of Sif. Sif liked what she liked, and after centuries upon centuries of knowing herself, she had come to understand that she liked very specific things about a broad array of people. What she did not like about herself at the moment was how, like a pre-pubescent boy, a change of wind might give her body signals that she definitely liked something. Trying to ignore those for the time being, Sif smiled proudly down at the Captain. "I am aren't I? A good translation if I do say so myself. Much like yours!"

The poor Captain was clearly in no mood for courteous complimentary exchanges, and how Sif understood him. "Of course, yes. I have my shift and leather under-armor, if you like, and some items Natasha has loaned me. The ones you have met me in as well as a long sleeved shirt and a hooded jacket. They are small on me, but I was going to ask where I could purchase more when this-" she pointed at herself "-happened. All my clothes are clean, however, I made sure of it not two days ago."

She looked at him again, pulling away for a wider view. "Though really if Ruby is any indication, all you need is a pair of trousers and you will be all right, just do this-" She reached for him and tied his shirt into a knot at the beginning of his hips, making him as a whole a lot more shapely as the excess fabric was sucked into the knot. "-yes, it is the Midgardian fashion these days, it appears. Not the men's undergarments, however."

At the invitation to look, Steve did look closer at the shape of the face Sif then wore. When he thought to strip away the more masculine features (the dark shadow of a beard not shaved in a few days being one he thought particularly defining as such), attempting to redraw the sharp lines and hard features into softer definitions, he thought he could very well see how the translation had worked between the feminine and the masculine.

The translation was far from exact, of course, and while Steve could not then see his face, he suspected the same had to be true for him. The nose was sharp and thinner, rather than the rounder shape he remembered belonging to Sif's. The chin was broader and cleft, but the jaw was similar, as were the high sweep of her cheekbones.

It was a strange thing to see the woman he had met not long before within that far more masculine face, beneath those heavy brows and mouth that looked as if it were meant to be downturned at all times, but then smiled toothily at him.

"I would appreciate that," he nodded gratefully, at the offer of clothes that would better fit the body he wore then. Although even that thought had him pulling up as his chin dropped and he looked down at the body he stood in then with nothing like discretion. Despite the fact that there were feminine curves there he would have very much liked when they belonged to anyone other than himself, Steve's cursory inspection was no more lecherous than he supposed (likely wrongly) that Sif would have done with her own new body. When he lifted his gaze to the woman across from him again, it was with the awareness that he needed to find the most politic way to say that he doubted her clothes would fit him well, and why.

He froze as Sif instead reached for his shirt and tied it at his hips, not knowing quite sure what he was supposed to do with himself, let alone his hands, through the task. "I, uh-" with a look down at Sif's work, he couldn't deny that the shirt fit a little better, though to see so much bare thigh and it not be remotely familiar was disorienting. "I might have to borrow something...loose. Until I can find something better fitting. You're-" and the question of the hour, could Steve Rogers find a way to tell Lady Sif of Asgard that he had a more curvaceous body than her without offending her and learning whether it felt the same to be popped in the mouth when their genders were switched?

"-slimmer."

While the Captain observed his own newly acquired body Sif did the same to his face, amused. It had to be a hard thing to stomach - Sif had only been able to because of copious amounts of drink and her new friend Ruby coming to the rescue when the diminutive bathrobe was about to fail her. Taking a step back after she tied that knot on his oversized shirt Sif bit her bottom lip as her eyes roamed the top half of the Captain's new body. "You need breast support." A bra, Ruby had called it. Sif called it breast harnesses or corsets, depending, but it was all a matter of jargon. "It will do you no good to walk around with things bouncing about the place. And believe you me, you shall have that problem such as I never have."

As it seemed Steve had found himself a tiny bit tongue-tied, which was only natural after all, Sif tilted her head while waiting for his sentence to make sense. And make sense it did. She raised an eyebrow at first, then chuckled, looking down at her feet. "I am, aren't I? You have the most impressive hip-to-waist ratio. As impressive as your shoulder-to-waist one, in fact." she mused trying not to leer again and focus on the task at hand. My, but her male sensibilities proved distracting more often than not. "But the training trousers Natasha let me borrow stretch, even if they might be a slight bit short on you as well. And you can use that shirt. We would only need to find you breast support. Though I saw something about yoga pants at the shop, would that work for you?" Sif had no clue what yoga pants were, but she knew Americans called trousers and breeches pants so those might be what Steve was looking for.

Alcohol had, as it were, abandoned him too fully for it to so much as occur to Steve that it might have been an option then. He did not consider muscle to fat ratios, that the metabolism he had grown so used to might have been altered by biochemistry or that the sheer size difference between the shape of himself he had grown used to and the one he stood in then might have changed the equation enough to have allowed him to feel more than the very edge of alcohol's effects. Perhaps if it had, he might have headed straight for the bar he had avoided for the whole of his stay (both stays, rather) in the hotel and ordered a bottle and a glass and reacquainted himself with what one could forget with enough whiskey.

Anything but comfortable with both the recognition that the changed shape of his body came with soft shape of breasts beneath his shirt, and the fact that as he crossed his arms across his chest, they were put into greater prominence, Steve wanted for (more than) a moment to turn on his heel and hide again in his room. Without a clear figure to blame for the transformation or any understanding of how or why it had come about, he felt as if he floundered where he might otherwise have dug in his heels and leapt into the proverbial (or literal) fray.

Although he did not know her well, and did not know her current face at all, Sif's easy assurance did allow him room enough to breathe. While seeking out Natasha would have been his first option otherwise, he instead nodded and took her help gladly. "It would. Thank you, Sif," he told her, reaching out to lay a hand on that unfamiliar arm. "Really, I appreciate it."

As Sif's conversation with a female-looking Captain Steve Rogers went on, she was left more divided between amusement and compassion over his visible struggles with his new, more feminine attributes. It was humorous yet endearing, and Sif had to remember that it had to be a nightmare. It wasn't one for her now, but then, she had drank copious amounts of alcohol that first night strictly in order to get - and stay - drunk. There was a reason for that.

Nodding once more, Sif smiled widely at the Captain, even more when he laid a small hand on her much larger arm. "Warriors help each other. So do friends. Now come, we make for my room for Natasha's clothing, then for the shop. I do not believe they have undergarments, but they might have bathing attire that can make for such things."

Steve could be nothing less than grateful that in the unreality of the situation, he had run into someone he knew at least as well as Sif. That he hadn't been left to flounder on his own without someone there who understood what had happened to him and was more then willing to help him where he would not have known even where to have started. Had it been a battle, an ambush, a siege, he would have understood, but to have lost the shape of himself and left quite literally stumbling out his door with no idea of what had happened to him, he might have ended up planting himself on the floor and been no use to anyone. Let alone himself.

He nodded at Sif's words. "Lead the way."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Dude looks like a lady

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