Chapter Text
Captain America is not used to wearing a suit.
The knitted cotton tights of his movie outfit, where baggy knees were the continuing despair of the wardrobe mistress, perhaps. Military fatigues or his battered leather jacket, absolutely. His new designed-to-look-old-fashioned-but-strategically-reinforced-with-spandex fighting gear... kinda, although he'd never had the nerve to tell his designed-to-look-old-fashioned handler that the lack of baggy knees made him feel a little homesick. But this was the other kind of suit - the kind where you wore a tie, and there were tailors involved, and the design hadn't really changed since the days when he saw upper class men behave arrogantly in moving pictures that cost him a dime to get in to. And there were things that came with wearing a suit, like being polite to boring people. He’s been dragged along to a few of these things and told that they’re for ‘work’, but still, preening is an alien feeling.
Then Steve turns around and catches sight of a young woman he’s pretty sure was just checking out his ass. She has small high breasts and mahogany brown hair cut in soft waves around her face, and a discreet nose stud, which he’s still not used to seeing on people. She quirks her eyebrows at him unapologetically, raises her glass… and turns around and goes off to talk to someone else. Her gown is showing a lot of back, and there’s warm soft skin stretched over smoothly defined muscle, and he likes that. She has a very straightforward way of moving – not the opulent sway of the expensive women who slither up to him at parties like this one, nor the lithe ‘I could kill you with my left pinkie’ grace of his female co-workers. He likes that, too.
“Strictly off-limits,” a voice crackles in his earpiece.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mutters.
“Yeah, you do,” Hawkeye goes on, “and you want to tell Coulson you’re making eyes at one of his daughters, that’s your own look out.”
“Coulson’s married?” he asks.
“Divorced,” their blandly amiable handler comes on line. “Perhaps we could keep the office gossip to when we’re off duty…?”
***
Amelia Coulson is not used to wearing a dress.
Miniskirts or jeans are more her style, or when the situation warrants, a lab coat, but just occasionally there are perks to her job, and getting to wear a dress and talk to posh people is one of them.
And she’s thinking: Yes, I, Amelia Coulson, am in Naples, as an internationally renowned scientist (or supervised grad student of same) at a conference where they do black tie Meet & Greets and looking forward to some heavy duty rubbernecking wedged in between the Science, but then there's Steve Rogers and while she’s absolutely OK with Hot Dang! He fills out a tuxedo nicely, a quiet treacherous part of her is channelling her Dad: Well, I’ll be, Captain America! And then she sees Natasha Romanov glittering in a corner which must mean that, no, it’s not random chance that Captain America’s at her physics conference, that Coulson must be in a back room whispering in their ears, and she’s willing to pay money that he hasn’t called her Mom in the last six months. It figures, she thinks, and goes to check in on her supervisor.
She finds Professor Farley seated in a throne-like chair and letting slightly less eminent physicists pay her court: Amelia makes a point of fussing over her – drinks, a plate of choice nibbles, smiling and nodding at Farley’s friends and subtly letting them know that she was associated with the professor. And why not? If she was going to preen, she might as well make the most of it.
“My dear,” Prof Farley says, “would you do me a favour?”
***
Steve wanders through the crowd ‘making nice.’ “Can someone remind me what we’re looking for exactly?” he whispers into his mike.
“Hinky stuff,” from Hawkeye.
“Signs of suspicious behaviour,” from Coulson. “The threat we’re responding to was on the vague side. Please be alert for activity that doesn’t fit the normal profile.”
“Which means what, exactly?” from Bruce.
Coulson sighs. “We look for ‘hinky’ stuff.”
Steve turns – that girl is heading toward him. This time, she decides to talk.
“Hi, I’m sorry, this is a bit awkward, and we’ve not actually met.” She fidgets a little until he nods at her. “Yeah, so… the thing is, a friend of mine is a huge fan of yours – I don’t suppose you’d mind being introduced for a couple of minutes?”
And he figures it’ll be some overly thin debutante or, maybe, given the tone of the evening, an earnest and bespectacled bluestocking and he’d have to be careful about hero worship. Actually, it turns out to be the girl’s professor, and there’s a glint in the old woman’s eye that reminds him sharply of the maternal women he’d sorted scrap metal with during the War before he’d joined the army. He wonders if, like them, she’s going to pinch his cheek and call him ‘adorable’.
The little old lady was ensconced in a huge chair, surrounded by earnest looking scientists. When he approaches, she gives him a huge beaming smile: “Captain America! I always wanted to meet you – I read all your serials when I was young, and your movies, of course... Schnapps?” And he flinches at the proffered shot glass because he’s suddenly having a vivid memory of Dr Erskine not giving him schnapps and laughing about it.
He blinks a little and takes the glass. “Thank you very much, uh…”
Miss Coulson whispers in his ear. “Professor Farley. Physics. Presenting tomorrow.”
He sips the schnapps and goes on smoothly. “… Professor. I hope your presentation on…”
Agent Coulson: “N-dimensional imaging of the M1 nebula...”
“… imaging goes well tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’m sure Amelia will do fine.”
“What?” The girl looks startled.
“Didn’t I tell you, dear? I’m feeling a little wheezy. Much better for you to present, and I’ll help you with the Q&A afterwards.”
The girl’s eyes bug out, and he thinks she’s about to explode. Huh. Anyway, he’s working tonight: “Professor Farley, Miss Coulson,” he nods at them both impersonally. “Good luck then,” and slinks off to look for something ‘hinky’ before his cheeks could get molested.
***
It was her big opportunity, and Iron Man was ruining her presentation. Well, OK then, Anthony Stark, the surprise substitute keynote speaker was ruining her presentation. Seriously, he was late, dishevelled, and bumping his way noisily through the seated audience on his way to the one vacant seat in the lecture theatre.
Wearing spectacles and pretending to be attentive once he'd finally sat down wasn't cutting it.
“…and so,” she moves on, “as you can see from the recorded test data, our calculations that the photonic distribution would form a characteristic peacock's eye diffusion weren’t entirely supported. What we did find was that-”
“Now hang on,” Stark interrupts. “Surely the variance can be explained by the Liechmann Paradox – see here…” and he’s holding up a dirty scrap of paper with scribbles on it and starting to babble.
She directs her remarks vaguely to his section of the room. “As the good Mr Stark would know if he’d taken the time to read our paper abstract - or arrive punctually - the effects of the Liechmann Paradox were accounted for in our experimental design. If he’d care to review the first three pages of the handout, I’ll continue with our findings…”
She moves on to the image slides, a bloom of vivid colour: “What we found was that once we accounted for the discrepancy in observation points, we were able to tune our incoming data feed with a high degree of coherence and good correlation with control readings from the Hubble telescope. Once we had that, we were able to ‘wind back the clock’ on our readings and get images from earlier in their life cycle.” She set the animation going and let her audience watch the image of the Crab nebula slowly fold in on itself and the supernova dwindle.
“Holiday snapshots-” Stark interrupts.
“No. I’m saying that all these packets of light that we get - they’re not snapshots. They all carry the memory of what they’ve been. Every photon knows that it used to be the heart of a galaxy, you just have to look at it the right way. Look. A thousand years ago, people saw a ‘guest’ star when SN1054 went supernova… We can see that again, now. We can understand what happened all that time ago.” And then she falters, because she can see Captain America (!), or actually his modest alter ego, at the back of the lecture theatre talking urgently to himself, his hand against his ear as if listening to something.
The MC of her lecture stream touches her arm, and she turns. He takes over the mike: “Excuse me, ladies, gentlemen… if you would all please evacuate the building. Please remain calm.”
“What’s going on?” she asks.
He covers the mike. “Bomb threat, Amy. Probably nothing but we have to get the building searched.”
Around them, the fire alarm is going off, and she covers her ears trying not to think of air raid sirens as her audience bumble their way to their feet and mill around looking for the emergency exits. Idiots. She helps her supervisor pack up the test device they’d brought for show and tell and supports Prof Farley by the elbow as they head for the small door behind the lectern. Behind it, yes, there in the service corridors, is one of her father’s specialists talking busily into a mike. Right, then. She marches up to Agent Romanov.
“It’s not what you think,” Natasha says.
***
Steve walks into the incident room, and for a moment he’s in a Norman Rockwell painting, a scene of intense domesticity: an old woman and a younger one seated at a table showing off the workings of a machine to an earnestly interested Bruce; two men, also, intent on the monitors covering one wall, casually comfortable with each other, pointing out items of interest. Then he blinks, and it’s all Ed Hopper and crushed colour tones, and the two groups hyper-aware of and also ignoring each other, with Bruce gamely holding down the neutral territory.
“Top two floors are clear,” he says.
Natasha walks in behind him, and he turns to nod at her and blinks, because he’s having a sudden vivid flash of Agent Romanov walking into a room and stripping out of her clothes, and he’s trying to work out why he feels like he’s watching the scene from two sets of eyes. And why it seems so intensely unerotic and matter of fact. He shakes his head for a moment, distracted.
The door bangs open, and Tony bustles in. “There’s nothing. I can’t find any trace of that radiation signature you thought you had, Bruce- hey! What’s she doing in here?”
Miss Coulson speaks without looking up from her machine. “My professor is seventy and has a heart condition. Making her stand outside in the rain wasn’t such a hot idea.” She pauses. “Oh hero, my hero,” she adds in a deadpan voice. She pauses to help her professor fiddle with a pill bottle.
Tony scowls and joins the group checking out the monitors.
“Was that really necessary, Amelia?” Coulson asks mildly.
“Compared to all this…?” she waves her hands vaguely. “This is a science conference. I think you’re all a little bit confused about the kinds of things that go on here. The biggest risks I’m worried about are being groped by one of the speakers and staving off alcohol poisoning at the post-grads’ knees up. Not someone trying to take over the world or mess with the space-time continuum or... whatever else it is you guys do. Because we’re actually all here just to talk about stuff. And get a bit drunk. Like people do. Normal people with normal lives. Until you show up and everything turns into complete chaos.”
“There was a terrorist threat, honey. We can’t ignore it.”
Amelia flushes. “Doesn’t the state of Italy have, like, its own police force? Because your lot arriving always means a whole world of trouble. And for what, exactly?”
“You’re over exaggerating, Amelia.” Coulson had turned away from the monitors and his face was as bland as Steve had ever seen it.
“I remember the time you had your two goons waiting in my dorm room, for when I brought my date back. No offence –” she glances quickly at Hawkeye and Black Widow.
“None taken,” Natasha shrugs.
“He was a security risk…”
“And then there was the time we were taking classes in a prefab for two semesters because you’d sent Big, Green and Muscly to smash up my university. (Sorry),” she adds.
“It’s fine,” Bruce says.
“Saving the world, sweetheart.”
“And you stole my computer because you wanted some files on it!”
“We got you a new one,” Coulson puts in weakly.
“From Stark Industries. What kind of tinpot crappy junk is that?”
“Hey!” Tony Stark suddenly starts paying attention. “If your hack of a daughter thinks she can disrespect my engineering division-”
“Hack? Strong words coming from the world’s biggest dilettante. Liechmann Paradox, my left toe.”
“Amelia, we were doing the best we could,” Coulson puts in. “Stark, if we could keep this at a professional level-”
“No. No. Where does she get off insulting my w-”
“Tony,” Steve interjects, “it’s fine. Let it go.”
“Oh, it’s fine, alright. Just so you know? I had photos on that computer that I’m never going to get back. So are we done? There’s no actual bomb, yes? Then it’s time for us to go.” She gathers up her professor with the rigid air of someone who really wants to slam the door on her way out, but is too good mannered to, and wants you to know it.