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Steve wakes up being carried bridal style which is new. Well not new-new, new for his post serum life. Opening his eyes to find the person carrying him is a normal human woman is disquieting.
“Oh good you’re awake keep up,” she dumps him onto his feet and he keeps up, primarily because they appear to be handcuffed together, and also there are little blue creatures running after them shooting laser guns? So Steve keeps up.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” Steve says calmly as they take a turn down one corridor and the next. She seems to know where they’re going, which is good, she also seems to be able to keep up with him, which is surprising. In fact neither of them is out of breath despite the pace.
“Carol,” she turns without missing a beat and blasts some sort of energy out of her bare hands at the creatures behind them. Steve experiences the swell of adoring respect he feels for all his hypercompetent friends.
“Steve Rogers,” he replies. Carol shots him a quirked grin, does a surprised double take and comes to a complete stop to stare. The things chasing them gain some ground, but Steve takes the pause to grab a panel of the wall and rip it down, it’s hard metal with a rung like handle. Not as good as a shield but it feels good to have something in his hands. A blast goes past them, a second follows that he blocks with the make-shift shield, then checks the damage to see if it’ll hold up against further assault. The results are good.
Carol seems to recollect herself while under fire, and that’s another thing Steve admires in a person, so she takes off. He’s still attached to her, wrist to wrist, so he follows. Maybe they should stop and break the cuffs, but she was carrying him, she’s got enough muscles to have given it a go, and presumably she has a better handle on the situation- whatever situation this is. Besides she’s still keeping up with him (and he isn’t going to theorise about the energy blasts from her hands because he has no idea what that means in terms of anything).
“So, are you actually Captain America?” She asks.
“I am. How big is this place?” A creature breaks out of a vent above them and Steve blocks it and uses the momentum to fling it in amongst it’s little squabbling friends. Without missing a beat they keep going.
“In terms you’d understand?” she asks as if thinking about the answer, “about the size of New York City- well New York City in 1980’s.”
“So big,” Steve accepts, “and where are we?”
“If I had to guess I’d say somewhere near the R’ituc quadrant,” Carol comes to a stop at a large set of doors shots a blast of energy down the corridor they’ve just come down to scatter their blue followers and punches the thick metal with glowing fists to try and break through. The metal gives inch by inch.
“I’m not familiar with the R’ituc quadrant,” Steve takes a protective stance in front of the woman and lets her work. She seems to know what she’s doing so he focuses on keeping the stray shots from hitting either of them.
“We’re about 200 jump points from New York City. Help me with this. I can open it from the other side,” she has a decent sized opening in the door now so Steve sets his metal plate down and grabs one corner of the opening to make it bigger.
“Any idea how I got here?” Steve asks as he folds the metal down then like it’s butter soft.
“I know as much as you.”
“On what topic?” Steve doubts honestly.
She gives him a smile that reaches her eyes then says, “if you were smaller this’d be easier.”
“I used to be smaller,” he admits and she flicks him another once over.
“I know. Now I have to go in backwards so don’t drop me,” she wriggles their cuffed wrists in explanation, so Steve picks her up at the hips. She’s light for a woman her size but it’s still awkward to have her pelvis crushed against his cheek, her left-hand balancing on his head, and her right bent back to be nearer his own left arm. They do the best they can in the circumstances though, and Steve isn’t above looking past awkward to get a job done. Nothing’ll beat the time all the commandos had had to use him like a ladder to get to higher ground in the middle of a flash flood. He’d met parts of them he’d rather never have known existed. Dum Dum had farted and it still wasn’t the worst part of it.
He gets her through the hole, and she shimmies backwards angling her right hand to stay as close to him as possible even when the rest of her has disappeared. Steve presses his own arm through the hole to give her as much give as she can get.
“What do you see?”
“Not a whole lot.”
There’s some noise and Steve feels his arm jiggle as she does something on the other side while he keeps his eyes on the corridor, listening to the frenzy of the blue creatures who occasionally peep around corners to shoot at him. He has to angle his foot to get the shield back when one shot gets a little too close. It’s a good thing they don’t seem willing to get physically closer to him. He’s blocked quite a few shots when Carol makes a success sound and the door slides partially open. Not all the way, mind, because the torn metal pieces get in the way of the mechanism, but it’s enough for him to squeeze through and Carol shuts it behind him.
Steve enjoys relaxing his arm while the woman bypasses lights and instead lights up like a light bulb.
“Oh,” Steve hasn’t seen that trick before, “how do you do that?”
“I was caught in an experimental spaceship explosion by my ex-CO.” Which is certainly an explanation even if it does leave more questions than answers.
With light in the room Steve can see it’s a hanger but he doesn’t recognise any of the craft- which is about right for his life these days.
“Can you fly these?” Steve hopes the answer is yes then his eyes adjust and he realises the far wall isn’t a wall but a great big window into space. So they’re in space. It’s a surprise as much as it isn’t.
“I can probably figure it out, but like this,” she lifts their cuffed hands between them, “we’re gonna have to get real comfortable and earths not exactly nearby.”
“How do we get them off then?” Steve prioritises and she gives him a look.
“How fire proof are you?”
“Not very.”
“But you’ve got rapid healing, right?”
“I really don’t want to test it,” Steve says stonily.
Carol rolls her eyes, casually blasts another bolt of energy at the oncoming creatures through the door and asks, “What’s your plan then? Those things are RoBe and there’s a lot of them, but they’re the little guys, not too smart, not too strong. Right now they’re trying to cover up that we broken out but the second a RoRe or RoGre notice the ruckus were causing an entire mega city of angry genetically engineered RoEts are coming after us and it’s going to get messy. So, what have you got?”
Steve doesn’t look for an alternative, instead he looks at her, weighing and judging what he’s seen. She’s earnest, reminds him of his unit more than anyone else he’s met since the ice. He thinks Bucky would either hate or love her depending how hard his protective instincts kicked in when he saw her earnest face and big brown eyes.
Steve squares his shoulders and asks, “How do we do this?”
Her expression is grim when she shows him something akin to a blow torch that she’s apparently already led them over to. She shoves a pair of goggles at him and he puts them on automatically, too used to Starks and their science labs, and then she lights the thing. The goggles are an inch thick in places, pitch black with a computer read out, and the light of the torch is pure white and blazing. Steve can barely look at it, but Carol positions his hand on a bench and starts to burn the cuffs away from her own wrist first. It’s hot, very hot, even though the torch isn’t anywhere near his own hand he feels the warmth in the sinews of his muscles.
Carol doesn’t flinch and he realises it's not that she’s toughing it out, it’s that she’s not affected by the burn. Considering he is fighting the instinct to pull his hand away and doing it only by curling his fingers over the corner of the table to hold on he wonders what kind of ship hers had been before it exploded. He doesn’t have long to wonder before there’s a metal clank of the handcuffs falling from her wrist and she powers down the torch.
He reaches for his goggles, and she says, “Keep them on, cowboy,” which he does. Then the next instant her hand ignites, even through the glass he can see it, and it’s not as intense as the blowtorch but the readings seem to go crazy and then the glass he’s trying to look through blackens completely a word flashing in the left corner like a reboot error message.
He feels a blast of energy, the blow back from it, and then the cuff loosens around his own wrist. He takes the goggles off and checks his wrist. It’s pinkish like it’s sunburnt, warm to the touch, but there’s nothing else wrong with it.
“Pretty fireproof after all,” Carol tells him with a tilt to her head.
Steve flexes his fingers thoughtfully and concedes the point.
“Pretty good aim,” he compliments. Carol holds her hands up and they flare alive with a pulsing shimmer of energy.
“Still better for punching things into orbit than precision work, but I try my best. Wouldn’t want to injure Captain America after all.”
“My friends call me Steve,” he offers his hand and she takes it firmly.
“Well then, Steve, let’s say we get out of here before we bare out deepest darkest secrets.”
“What?” Steve isn’t sure he followed that at all.
“RoGre protocol is to dose up their prisoners with uninhibitors so they’ll spill the beans on their own genetic modifications, they pride themselves on it,” Carol explains, then, “Has it been a while since the blue guys tried to break in?”
“Yes,” Steve hasn’t thrown anything at them in quite a while.
“Time to go!” she picks a ship, and Steve follows. As the cargo door is closing behind him he looks back at the busted door and see some sort of red creature that’s four times as big as the blue ones and has more muscles than a tank, behind is a slim green creature that has to bend to get in through the door. Steve isn’t sure how hard they’d be to fight, but the engines kick in and the ship is blasting out into space before he’s strapped in.
He breathes out, gets to his feet and steps up beside Carol who’s in the pilot seat and looking unhurried. If he had a unit he’d try and drag her into it, he knows that without a doubt.
“Better strap in,” she instructs and nods her head to the seat at her side, so he takes it.
“When does it kick in?” he asks as she does a sharp dive skimming past a spat of little ships that try and intercept them.
“What kick in?” she rolls the ship left, then doubles back to shoot a few of the small craft.
“You said something about being a drug.”
“Oh that,” she lets go of the yoke to wave dismissively, “it’s pretty much instant. I’m impressed, usually people blurt out all sorts of embarrassing stuff but it looks like Captain America really doesn’t lie.”
“I lie,” he says, offended, and she arches an eyebrow at him and hits the breaks to let another ship fly past them before she turns a sharp right. When she’s less focused on the flying he continues, “I lie or I wouldn’t be able to say I lie.”
“Touché,” she sounds amused, then with a cheeky grin she says, “Tell me a secret you’ve never told anyone.”
And he replies, “I still don’t know what ‘yeet’ means.”
Carol laughs and laughs and says through her laugher, “I have no idea either and Monica says it all the time.” Then she punches him lightly in the shoulder, and he feels it which is novel. “You’re okay, Rogers.”
Then she asks him more questions, ridiculous questions, and he keeps answering. Just as she answers when he asks her about the universe. It’s nice, friendly, the kind of thing he hasn’t had since fire lit nights on the western front when tomorrow was your last, but tonight was for living.
When she drops him off in an out of the way area two days later Steve shakes her hand and genuinely hopes they’ll meet again.
“I drop by sometimes, I’ll be sure to visit,” and he’s not sure if she’s lying because she told him the effects would have worn off already but he’s pretty sure Carol Danvers isn’t really the lying type, so he buys some beer on the way home and puts it in the back of the fridge for whenever next time is.