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He's a wing down and a man short. Sam knows that all that keeps him hanging with the likes of Mystery Man and Captain America are the wings and without one, he's got to ground himself before he becomes more of a liability than a help. If you'd told him last month that he'd be staging an air assault against S.H.I.E.L.D and their souped up helicarriers, he'd have told you that you were insane and given some recommendations for good psychiatric care at the VA but Sam isn't laughing now and he's thinking that he's the one in need of good psychiatric care.

But damn, it feels good to be fighting the good fight again and it feels even better to know that Captain America himself is depending on him. It feels better than flying sky high with nothing but a set of metal wings strapped to his back and Sam had been pretty sure there was nothing that compared to the exhilaration of that.

Except this.

He takes a landing that isn't so much graceful as functional through one of the blown-out windows of the Triskelion and starts pulling at doors, trying to find the best escape route. Since most of the good guys are technically Hydra's guys at this point, Sam's not sure who to trust. He wrenches open a utility door that looks promising; maybe it heads down an old, unused maintenance hallway and he can find a way out without tripping all the guards from here to Arlington.

The decor doesn't seem to match the door. Instead of the utilitarian metal and concrete that's the hallmark of most government buildings, this one leads to plush carpeting and warm, cheery decor. It looks like a damn vacation compared to where he just came from and Sam cranes his neck to see around the corner as best he can, hoping he doesn't get shot while he's pulling his worst Roadrunner impersonation. That would be a damn mess. Rogers would probably try to spin it during his funeral that he died a hero but he thinks at least Romanoff would be snickering in the background. Can't get anything past her. He doesn't get shot (this time) and decides that maybe it's worth the risk. The halls seem empty of personnel, friendly or not, and maybe it's a chance to get the hell out and get somewhere that he can coordinate back with his team.

He likes the sound of that, being part of a team again, and grins to himself as he carefully works his way down the hall, trying to look as nondescript as possible. That's a little hampered by the twisted, broken wing attached to his back but maybe anyone he runs into will be so damn shocked that they won't notice he's only half a bird right now. Maybe.

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Steve shook his head at that, leading the way through the doors of the bistro and making a beeline toward the buffet of food. "No, nothing like that." There he had to pause and consider, not for the wide array of food laid out before him but for the thought of what Fury might or might not know about the Nexus occurred to him with a delay that was almost overwhelming all on his own. Why hadn't he thought about whether Fury would know about the hotel? "A year ago I might've said that not even Fury knows where this place is, but I wouldn't take that bet now."

The strange combination of extreme isolation from the world and the collection of people and worlds to which they belonged offered a strange sort of mentality Steve hadn't thought too much about. Matters like who back in his (their) world might have visited it, whether or not they had said so aloud had been made all the murkier when he had discovered how Natasha and he had once been at the hotel at the same time and not even known it.

"Well, if Fury does know about this place, why isn't he holed up here too? Seems like a safe bet for him," Sam points out. "So maybe he doesn't know about it. Or maybe he doesn't think it's a viable option for him right now so he hasn't shown up with Hill and company."

Sam doesn't want to make a career of guessing what Fury will and will not do.

"It's hard to tell," he told Sam as he began filling up his plate with whatever caught his eye first. "How this place works - you never know where anyone is or who might be here unless you've gone looking for them yourself." That required the addendum born of Bucky's evasions over the past weeks and the frustration Steve had not been entirely able to shake off at feeling as if he were continually a step behind the other man. "And that's only when they want to be found."

Never mind the years between, Steve still filled his plate with an efficiency born of c-rations and the uncertainty that came with being out in the field more often than he had managed to be on a base or a city. "Natasha and I were here before. Two years ago, not long after New York." His eyes lifted to meet his friend's as he said, "In two months I never saw her once. I'd had no idea she was here."

"This place is that big?" Sam thinks that might be good, since he and Steve may or may not be fugitives from the government but the idea of getting lost in a building for months without seeing the people he knew is a little crazy.

"Seems a little crazy but, then again, isn't everything about our lives crazy?"

"Well..." Steve tipped his head as he finished his plate with a sandwich balanced on top of the already full serving, knowing he would be up and down enough as it was to go for refills in an attempt to keep up with the seemingly bottomless pit of his stomach. "It is and it isn't. Let's grab a seat and I'll give you the lay of the land."

That he could not deny, and grinned at his friend. "You're not wrong."

"My life has gotten exponentially more weird since you walked into it," Sam admits but it's good-natured. He thinks Steve is a fine commander and a loyal friend and he'd walk through the fire for him. Spending some time in a hotel that's bigger on the inside than it seems is not going to be a hardship.

"What's the deal with this place, then?"

Steve's lips quirk at that, his hands busy setting a napkin across his lap and reaching for a fork as he prepared to tuck into what was sure to be the first plate of many.

"It's complicated," he began, feeling as if he were repeating himself, but needing to preface what he was about to say with that to make sure the man who had backed him up and offered a safe place for Natasha and himself to stay as they made their gameplan wasn't flying blind. No pun intended, of course. As he stabbed a bite of scrambled eggs, he expanded up that comment, "The easiest way I have to explain it is that it's a sort of...place between worlds. I think I remember someone describing it as 'transdimensional hub.'"

"Transdimensional? Like what happened in New York two years ago?" Sam hadn't been running with them then but he knows what went down in New York, as much as the news outlets released. Even S.H.I.E.L.D couldn't cover up something that big.

Given how out of his depth Steve is on the subject, his understanding taken piecemeal from the conversations that had been bandied mostly above his head on the Helicarrier and supplemented only later by conversations there in the Nexus, it really was no wonder that his brows were drawn together as he sought the best way to explain what he had come to understand. "Yes," and then a beat, "And no."

Despite what some might have said about him, the problem only really seeming to have come up after he had been transformed bodily into the man he was at that moment, he was by no means slow on the uptake. His adaptability and ability to think outside the box had served him well over the years, and when put along with his penchant for reading any and all information he could get his hands on in order to further his understanding, made him no informidable force, but he understood that his grasp of astrophysics and magic was nowhere near that of others he had met. In old habit, he spoke around moments of eating and chewing, taking care not to speak with his mouth full or rush through either his words or his bites, the rhythm one he had perfected on the battlefield so long ago.

"It's a hotel, but set somewhere between dimensions or worlds. A kind of meeting place between them all." He tipped his head a degree, tapping the tines of his fork against his plate. "There are doors to worlds I've never heard of, people from places you or I would never have seen otherwise. All in a weird time lock, with people pulled sometimes from the same world at different points in time or different versions of the same world."

"I would say that was make believe," Sam says cautiously. "But then I've been hanging out with you and Romanoff long enough to know that superheroes are real, so I'm not going to just disregard it out of hand as a crazy person talking. So we're in some inter-dimensional hotel lobby with people from all over...you have any idea who's running this thing? Good, bad, something in between?"

Sam isn't sure that he should trust something that he doesn't see the brain behind. HYDRA taught him that much.

Only the mouth full of food Steve had then kept the man from laughing aloud at the implication that as one of those superheroes it all should sound a little less crazy to him. It was crazy, plain and simple. All of it. Incomplete serums that turned men into monsters, alien armies from across the galaxy, hotels with doors to other worlds, all of it. Having met a man who had been turned by Gamma Radiation into a green Hulk when his anger took hold and himself being a man who had survived being frozen for seventy years made none of it the least bit less ridiculous.

After chewing and swallowing, he tipped his head in the mental review of all he had yet seen of the Nexus and its universe. "No idea, really." Where he stole a pause for a long gulp of water, it was not without space enough to consider the pieces of the puzzle he had seen thus far. Or, rather, what he hadn't seen. "As far as I can tell it's not playing one direction or another. The people inside it seem to be what's at play here, good and bad."

"Is it relatively calm?" That's all Sam can ask for at this point. Asking for normal is out of the question with the given trajectory of his life now but he can deal with things being on the calm end of weird.

"No war or gang violence or anything that's going to get me shot, as far as you know? I don't want to be dodging bullets for the rest of my life even if I do want to be a superhero. Everyone needs a little down time."

"The hotel itself?" He asked, his actions slowing to a stop as he considered how best to answer. The reminder of all he had dragged Sam into when he had shown up with Natasha on the man's doorstep sent a kick of guilt through him, for all that Sam had told him time and time again that it was his decision to come along. Only the fact that it had been his choice and the fact that he did need the newest of his friends at his back kept him from saying so aloud. Well, that and he knew the other man would only chide him for it again. "I'd say the hotel's calm, yeah."

Steve took the time to drink half of his orange juice in one go before he swallowed, wiped his mouth and admitted with a tip of his head, "There are dinosaurs and zombies beyond the doors, though." A piece of bacon and he remembered, "Oh yeah, and...well, there's a door somewhere around here that'd have you turning in your skivvies for lacy lingerie." Remembering something of what he had learned of the new world, he added, "Not that it's any of my business what you like to wear. Or that I'd judge you for doing...whatever works."

Sam arches a brow. "Never been into cross-dressing but if that's your thing, no judging." The idea that behind some innocuous looking door there might be zombies or dinosaurs waiting to kill him is a little disturbing but at least it's danger he can choose to throw himself into. He hasn't had that option much lately.

"Did it offend your delicate 40s sensibilities?"

As much as Steve might have preferred to ease the other man into the strangeness of the hotel, the truth was that information continued to be the best weapon they had against the dangers that lurked behind some of the doors. Even if he had thought Sam would've been the type to appreciate being handled with kid gloves, it was safer and better for everyone involved if the mysteries and surprises were kept to a minimum.

Even as he huffed a laugh, dropping his chin to his chest as he stabbed a bite of egg before looking up at the man across from him. "Delicate '40s sensibilities, huh?" Wearing an expression that was blatantly unimpressed, for all the fact that he had taken to being amused at the continued expectation of him being shocked over the way the modern world was. "First off, I may have been raised by nuns, but I grew up in the '20s and '30s, not the '40s." Despite being separated by decades and experience on both sides of that 70 year divide, he could not help but think of the hours spent standing in soup and bread lines in the cold. Of going hungry too often in his teenaged years and way that hunger had never completely left him. "I toured with chorus girls for awhile and then went to war with the Howling Commandoes, you can't really think sex, filthy jokes and cursing is supposed to shock me, do you?"

"I meant that there's a door around here that'll change you to male to female and vice versa." He grinned to show that he was taking it with a sense of humor, adding, "I have it on good authority that I made one fine looking dame."

Sam snorts. There's no other way to describe the noise that comes out of his mouth and the laugh that follows feels pretty damn good. Everything has been on high octane for the last few weeks and having a moment to slow down and laugh about something with a friend over a meal is a luxury he hasn't had in forever.

"Yeah? Blonde, I guess? Anything else would just be wrong."

"You expected anything less?" Steve asked, scrubbing a hand over his own increasingly dark blonde hair. "Usual blonde hair, blue eyes...just a lot more soft and shapely. Looked like the kinda dame who'd never give me the time of day before the Serum." The years had taken away enough of the sting of that to make it an easy topic to joke about with a friend, as accepted a fact of life as that he'd been beaten up behind nearly every building and down every alley in Brooklyn before Erskine had taken a chance on him. "'Course," he admitted after a moment, "I was always more partial to brunettes."

"I'm more partial to anyone who gives me a second look," Sam says, smirking a little. It's been a while since he's been on a date and he guesses if he's going to be superheroing on a full time basis, his love life's going to have to suffer.

"Brunettes, huh? Do you have someone in particular in mind?"

While the memories of having been knocked completely off guard, of being surprised to not only be not trampled in crowds but of having women actually realize he existed were old memories indeed, there was something of them that had not faded with time. At the time he had been more often than not flustered and thrilled by his newfound effect on women, but as the realization had sunk in that all they saw of him was the shape he had been made to fit...much of the charm had worn off. But those were memories Steve left then in the past, thinking only momentarily of them as he nodded in agreement before he set them aside.

"Well, I-" Steve gave the other man a somewhat abashed grin, dropping his chin as the words brought a certain Asgardian warrior to mind. He lifted his eyes again to look at Sam as he admitted, "Maybe, yeah." As complicated as everything else was in his life at that moment, and as much of his energy he devoted to waiting out or searching for Bucky, just then all he could think of was of the way Sif's eyes lit up when she had spoken of her curiosity over how he fought with his shield. "Would you believe me if I told you she was the goddess of War?"

As little as he believed the Aesir were such things, he had to admit there was a certain ring to it. And if he was prodding his friend on purpose then, all the more entertaining.

Sam whistles lowly. "Goddess? You aim high." Still, he thinks that if anyone could land a goddess, it would be Steve.

"I'm guessing this is one of Thor's crew?" Sam knows only a little bit about Asgard and the various people who come in and out of it and he knows they are a hell of a lot stronger than regular humans.

Save for Natasha's continued attempts to find him a girl, her suggestions of many of SHIELD's non-combat ladies mixed with agents who weren't too far removed from themselves by SHIELD protocol and a few women here and there wholly unconnected (or so he had thought) from the agency, Steve could not think of the last time he had talked about a woman with a friend and it been so...easy. His grin then was reflexive, though he had to acknowledge he had done nothing by way of speaking to Sif that had been anything but friendly, more often the speech shared by soldiers than a fella looking at a pretty dame.

That might have been the key to it, now that he thought about it.

He nodded, "She is." A fact which spurred on the thought that he likely needed to speak to Thor about it, out of common courtesy rather than in asking for permission to be interested in the other man's friend. Somehow he was sure Sif might just knock him into next week if he thought of asking someone else permission to speak to her. "Her right hook is a thing of beauty, Sam, and you should see her move."

"That sounds like a keeper to me." Steve deserves to be happy and Sam thinks he's pretty glad to see him talking about someone the way he's talking about Sif. It's good for him to have something to focus on other than the mission.

"So what do you think she thinks about you? That's the big question."

He might have said that he thought she was beautiful. That her smile made it hard to breathe when he wasn't focused on keeping his feet in the middle of a fight. Might have. Thought it. Said what seemed more important.

"I-" Where he began to answer, he broke off with a twist of a grin and a shake of his head, all but flush with self-deprecation as he began again. "If I know one thing about women, it's that I don't know a damned thing about women." He had forgotten nothing of the disappointment on Peggy's face after he had solidly planted his foot in his mouth and been none the wiser on exactly how he had proved himself to be a jackass like all the rest. "Sif respects the shield and thinks I'm pretty fine as a dame, but beyond that? Don't have a clue."

"You could always do the crazy thing and just ask her outright. She sounds like someone who might appreciate being direct and not skirting around it like most women like," Sam suggests. "Worst she can do is say no, right?"

The fact of the matter was that where women were complicated enough as far as Steve was concerned, the difficulties of what he had called finding a shared life history in attempting to explain it to Natasha in the midst of her matchmaking, things seemed to grow infinitely more tangled the more he thought about it. He had a hard enough time attempting to talk to women he was interested in when they were from his own planet, who had the same general baseline as himself when it came to how relationships came together. As if he had much of a clue while living in the future. As if he had been able to make sense of it when he had been looking at a woman from the same world and the same time as himself.

"Well," he began, drawing the word out as he set an elbow on the table and leant into it. "Last time I offended a woman I was interested in, she shot at me. Three times." Not that he could blame her, in retrospect, but it had been a hell of a shock at the time. "I've seen Sif toss a heavy bag across the room like it was made of cotton candy."

That was not even mentioning the complication of her being the friend and comrade of a friend of his. One who had, upon their first meeting, attempted to kill him with a hammer blow that might've made a Steve smoothie out of him had he not had his shield handy.

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