Dude looks like a lady

[captain_rogers]

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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[the_allmother]

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.

[captain_rogers]

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."

[the_allmother]

"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.

[captain_rogers]

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."

[the_allmother]

"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.

[captain_rogers]

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."