Work Text:
Beginnings
Steve lay on his back on the Army cot and watched as the gray light of dawn slowly brightened. After the long, mostly sleepless night, the day had finally arrived. The day that he hoped would change his life forever, to say nothing of hopefully marking a turning point for the war effort too. Although he still found it hard to believe that. As if anything related to him–the scrawny kid from Brooklyn–could lead to a turning point in the war. But, well, Dr. Erskine seemed to think this serum of his, this so-called Project Rebirth, might well lead to a turning point in the war. If it worked. If Steve survived.
If…
Steve swallowed and tried to tamp down on the nerves rising inside him. Not that it worked. After Dr. Erskine had left, he had briefly felt a little calmer, something about Dr. Erskine’s quiet, soft-spoken demeanor seeming almost contagious. He had even managed to fall asleep but his sleep had been uneasy, marked with dreams where he’d been surrounded by the other recruits, all taunting him and asking why he thought he should possibly be the one to receive the serum. And then Agent Carter had appeared and sent them all packing and told him to stand up but then when he had, she had looked down at him pityingly and told him, “You aren’t enough.” He had spun away and started to run until he’d started to wheeze and he’d all but collapsed on the ground struggling to breathe and he’d suddenly found his mom standing over him and telling him, “Get up, Stevie. This is no time to be sitting on the ground.” He had struggled to his feet and then stared as a man in uniform came up to them, a man with dark hair and a face he didn’t know but eyes he recognized, the same blue eyes that stared out at him from a mirror, and Steve had realized with a burst of shock that this must be his dad. His dad had looked at him and said, “You’ll never be a soldier.”
And that was when Steve had jerked awake, his chest feeling tight and his breath coming uncomfortably fast until he’d feared it might be the start of another asthma attack, but he’d only lain there in bed and slowly, his breathing had slowed, the seeming band around his chest loosening. It had just been a dream. A crazy dream, he told himself. After all, he had seen his own dead parents, including the dad he had never even met.
But even knowing that the dream was a crazy one, born out of all his fears and his insecurities, after that, he hadn’t been able to fall asleep again. He’d sat up and torn a spare sheet of paper out of the back of one of the Army manuals to draw a sketch of Dr. Erskine, using the exercise of trying to picture the man and then capture the image on paper in order to try to calm himself, with limited success. He’d only been thankful that since being chosen to be the one to receive the serum, he’d been directed to this room, separate from the other recruits, first because it had spared him from the disgruntled mutterings and outright jealous confrontations he had expected from the other recruits and then because having the room to himself meant that he could turn the light on and sketch without fear of disturbing anyone.
It occurred to him that if the serum worked and made him stronger, it would be another reason to make him different from everyone else. He made a wry face. Well, he was used to not fitting in by now. It just seemed ironic that he might go from not fitting in because he was too small and weak and sickly compared to all the other boys and young men to not fitting in because he was suddenly stronger than most men.
If the serum worked. If he survived the whole procedure.
And there he was, right back to the thoughts, the fears, he couldn’t quite shake.
What had he been thinking, to volunteer to be experimented on like this? He wondered where Bucky was right now and what Bucky would say if he knew, probably some comment about Steve being an idiot to volunteer for something like this. And okay, Bucky wasn’t entirely wrong.
But he thought about his mother, what his mother had always told him about how his dad had volunteered to fight during the Great War because it had been his duty, no matter how hard it had been for his dad to leave behind his wife and unborn child. About his mother going to work every day in the TB ward even as she herself grew thinner and weaker because she said it was her duty and the right thing to do. Yes, he thought, his mother would have understood why he felt he needed to do this, needed to join the Army and take the chance Dr. Erskine had offered him, no matter what the risk might be. This was his chance to finally do something to make a difference and serve his country.
It was a risk but then again, considering his physical frailty, everything in life pretty much was a risk to him so he was used to that and anyway, physical safety wasn’t something Steve had ever cared much about. Safety, for him, would have meant staying indoors and likely tucked up in bed forever and never going anywhere, or something close to it, and he already knew from experience that he couldn’t stand a life like that. Mom had understood that. She might have fussed and fretted over him at times but at the same time, she had always tried to encourage him to try to do more, encouraged him to be brave like his dad had been.
Outside, he heard the sound of the bugle call the reveille and he pushed himself to sit up on the cot. Thanks to his appointment with Project Rebirth, he was excused from the training exercises scheduled for the rest of the recruits so he didn’t actually need to rush to get ready but at the same time, there was no point in just lying around either. So he got up and dressed in the equivalent of a dress uniform so he could at least attempt to look presentable for Project Rebirth, especially as from things that he’d overheard Colonel Phillips say to Dr. Erskine, there would be some officials, including an actual Senator, and possibly even reporters present for the procedure.
All the other recruits would be in the mess hall but Steve wasn’t allowed to eat anything before the procedure and even if he were allowed, he didn’t think he could actually eat with the way his guts were churning. Dr. Erskine had said that the procedure was scheduled to take place at roughly 10 in the morning at a secret laboratory somewhere off the base and Steve wandered outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of Dr. Erskine so he could ask the man a few more questions about what he could expect.
Unfortunately, he didn’t immediately see Dr. Erskine anywhere so Steve settled for taking a walk around the base for lack of anything better to do. He felt too jittery and restless to want to stay still.
Dr. Erskine had not told him much, only that he wasn’t entirely sure how long the procedure would take and that it would involve an injection of the Super-Soldier serum and an infusion of something called Vita-rays. He had admitted that the procedure would be painful and at the time, Steve had rather shrugged it off because he was used to pain. But over the long hours of the night, Steve had had rather too much time to reflect and realize that his experiences of various illnesses and being beaten up were likely not exactly comparable to the sort of pain he should expect from this sort of unprecedented experiment to make him into a super soldier.
Steve glanced down at his own scrawny form and grimaced. He assumed that the procedure would make him taller and bigger but how that would work he wasn’t sure. He had a sudden memory of a story he had read once years ago from the old Greek myths, about a bandit who attacked travelers and attached them to an iron bed and stretched them out or cut off the travelers’ legs to make their size conform to that of the bed. A mental image of himself being strapped onto a cot and stretched out like a piece of rubber flashed into his mind and he snorted a little laugh almost in spite of himself.
“You seem to be in very good spirits for someone about to undergo an experimental procedure.”
The sound of Agent Carter’s voice had Steve starting and spinning around so fast he almost lost his balance and the sight of her with a faint smile curving her lips, her eyes bright, had his heart starting to rabbit around in his chest so quickly he was half-afraid that it might presage the start of an asthma attack or one of his spells of arrhythmia. With his luck, he would end up passing out right in front of her. “Agent Carter! I-uh–didn’t know you were here,” he stuttered a little. And thought for about the thousandth time that she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen. Steve had an artist’s appreciation of beauty and Agent Carter was so lovely that he could hardly bear to look away from her whenever she was in sight, with her animated features, her beautiful dark eyes, her curly hair, the perfect figure he tried hard not to focus on overly much.
The curve of her lips deepened slightly. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
She was smiling at him, actually looking at him, not through him. Again. The surprise, not to say, thrill of it sizzled through him all over again. To have a girl–no, to have this girl, this woman–actually looking at him, seeing him, and not with pity or mockery or anything like that, but directly, as if he mattered. “Oh, no, it’s all right. I was… uh, just thinking.” He could have kicked himself as it occurred to him, belatedly, how inane he sounded. How did Bucky manage it, he wondered, talk to girls so easily? Steve had never exactly learned how, not that there had been any girls interested in listening to him talk, and until now, he hadn’t even particularly minded. As far as he could tell from his admittedly very limited knowledge of girls from the disastrous double dates Bucky had arranged, most girls were frankly silly, liked to giggle and gossip, about clothes and boys and film stars or things like that, none of which interested Steve in the slightest. It hadn’t seemed as if he were missing that much even though not a single girl had ever given Steve a second look. (For that matter, most girls hadn’t even given him a first look.) Now, though, he found himself wishing desperately that he actually knew how to talk to girls–or at least, to a girl, this girl.
Agent Carter was, well, different, interesting. For one thing, he had yet to hear her giggle, not that it would have been at all appropriate on a military base, but in any event, he couldn’t imagine her giggling. If only because silly was the last word he would ever use to describe Agent Carter. No, she was smart, capable, confident, and strong. She didn’t put up with any nonsense and considering the nature of the other recruits, she dealt with a lot of nonsense–crude comments made behind her back but deliberately pitched loud enough for her to hear, the occasional outright insults, the often obscene jokes that were not about her specifically but about women in general that were obviously intended for her hearing and meant to insult. She feigned deafness when she could but when she couldn’t, had punched more than one recruit as she had that jerk Hodge, and on one memorable occasion, had effectively used her knee in a strategic place to leave another recruit who had pretended to stumble into her so his hand had landed on her… er, chest… writhing in pain on the ground. That recruit, Saunders, had since gone out of his way to give Agent Carter a wide berth, while Steve had needed to bite back the impulse to applaud.
Steve had heard the offensive comments and burned with helpless indignation on her behalf and had done what little he could to stop it, not-accidentally tripping up the latest offender or deliberately stumbling and falling into the next jerk so the jerk got a mouthful of dust. When on the climbing nets when he’d realized that one of the jokers, Taylor, was following behind him, he had pretended to lose his footing, a believable ruse considering how badly he did during all these physical training exercises, so he had stepped on Taylor’s face and head. He had drawn a few caricatures of some of the other offenders and deliberately left them lying around for the other recruits to find and set the offenders up as a target for the mockery of the other recruits, because Steve knew from experience that bullies hated being made fun of almost more than anything else. It wasn’t nearly enough but it wasn’t as if Steve could engage in outright, pitched battles with his fellow recruits, first, because he was unlikely to win and losing such a fight wouldn’t serve any purpose, and second, because he would only end up getting disciplined himself, which he wouldn’t have minded if it would have done any good but since he knew it wouldn’t, he did mind. Not for the first time, Steve wondered why so many men were such cads to women but then again, it didn’t seem to stop some of those same men from also attracting women so Steve had to conclude that he didn’t understand women either.
“I’m sure you have quite a bit to think about with the procedure this morning, Private Rogers.”
Steve felt his ears get hot, why he didn’t know. “I’m just Steve, really,” he managed. He wasn’t quite used to being called Private Rogers, maybe because he was quite aware that he was probably the worst recruit in the history of the army, had no business being here if it weren’t for Dr. Erskine’s quixotic decision to give him a chance, so it sounded odd to him.
She gave him another slight smile. “Just Steve, then. And I’m Peggy.”
Peggy. Agent Peggy Carter. He didn’t know why her name echoed in his mind the way it did. Peggy. It was… endearing, the informal sound of it. Short for Margaret, he was sure, and a moment ago, if he were asked, he was sure he would have thought, expected, that Agent Carter’s first name should be something that sounded, oh, powerful, formidable, as she was–like… his brain mentally scrambled… Minerva or Boudica or Atalanta. But now, he was suddenly convinced that Peggy was the perfect name for her. Although he didn’t think he could quite get up the nerve to call her by her first name, at least not yet.
“I–uh–did you come to find me for a reason? Not that I mind,” he hurriedly added, “I was just wondering.”
There he went again, sounding like a bumbling idiot. He had never in his life wanted to impress a girl more than he did Agent Carter and it seemed like every time he opened his mouth, he did nothing but stick his foot in it.
“Actually, yes. I wanted to let you know that I’ll be accompanying you to the experiment site this morning. Colonel Phillips and Dr. Erskine already left very early this morning to go over to the laboratory. Dr. Erskine wanted to consult with Howard Stark and inspect all the equipment one last time.”
“Oh. Thank you for telling me.” So Dr. Erskine was already gone. So much for asking Dr. Erskine any more questions.
She glanced quickly at her watch. “Corporal Briggs will be driving us over to the site at 0800 hours so in a little more than half an hour.”
“Where is this laboratory?”
“It’s in New York, outside of the City itself, in a neighborhood called Brooklyn.”
Steve blinked in surprise. “Really? That’s where I’m from.”
She gave him a smile. “Well, then, I guess you can look forward to returning home this morning, at least for a little while.”
Agent Carter was always pretty but God, when she smiled, she was beautiful, mesmerizing. It occurred to him rather fuzzily that one unlooked-for benefit of his height, or lack thereof, was that it meant his eyes were almost level with her mouth, her full, fascinating lips, and he had to remind himself to jerk his eyes up to hers. She was so beautiful that his hands almost itched to draw her, even as he was filled with a strange sort of despair that perhaps only an artist could feel, the sinking certainty that he would never be able to do her justice. He could spend the next 100 years drawing Agent Carter and he was suddenly sure that he would never, ever, be able to truly capture her.
He realized belatedly that he’d been staring and felt some heat creeping into his cheeks and partly to cover up his discomfiture and partly because he really did want to know–he suddenly thought that he wanted to know everything about her–he found himself asking, “Where is home for you?”
“Kansas,” she drawled and surprised a little huff of laughter from him.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” he quipped unthinkingly–and then felt his cheeks burn as it occurred to him that if she didn’t understand the reference, she might think he’d given her a nickname.
But then he relaxed as her smile widened, her eyes dancing with humor. “I’m actually from a small village a little outside of Winchester, England.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” he responded, trying to sound knowledgeable.
Her head tilted a little as she regarded him for a moment and then said, “You don’t have any idea where Winchester is, do you?”
“Um, no,” he admitted, feeling his cheeks heat.
She gave a little huff that was almost a laugh but oddly, he didn’t mind it because he knew she wasn’t laughing at him. He’d been the subject of enough mockery to be able to tell and with the way she was regarding him now, well, she wasn’t laughing at him. Rather, it seemed as if she were laughing with him, looked, somehow, pleased, although he had no idea why. “Winchester is in southwest England, around 65 of your miles outside of London.”
“I, um, feel like I should have known that somehow.”
“Why should you know? I don’t know exactly where Kansas is, for example, just that it’s somewhere in the middle.”
He laughed again as his heart seemed to give a little swoop, if that made any sense. It occurred to him with an odd sense of surprise that Agent Carter was funny. “That’s about as much as I could tell you too.”
It was her turn to laugh softly and his silly, stupid heart leaped. He had made her laugh. And he thought he’d never heard or seen anything quite as charming.
There was a brief, rather awkward, pause and then after a moment, she began to turn away. “Corporal Briggs will meet us with the car just before the gate hut in around half an hour so you have some time if you want to take care of anything before then.”
“No, I–wait,” he found himself blurting out before he’d consciously realized he was going to do so. All he knew was that he didn’t want her to leave. She turned back to him, her eyebrows faintly arched, and he scrambled for words, something, and finally just asked, “will you, um, walk with me? That is, if you don’t have anything else to do.” He made an awkward gesture with his hands. “I don’t want to bother you but… uh, I guess I’d rather not be alone.”
“I don’t have anything else to do,” she answered, her voice a little softer. “With both Colonel Phillips and Dr. Erskine gone, there isn’t much to do except wait.”
She fell into step beside him and then after a moment, she asked, “are you nervous about the procedure?”
“No, I’m not nervous,” he managed and then somehow, without even realizing it, he found himself going on, “I’m terrified.”
He could have kicked himself. Of all the stupid, stupid things to say to the one girl he wanted to impress! But then she surprised him again because she gave him a slight smile that he could tell wasn’t at all mocking but was instead, amazingly, somehow pleased, even approving. He stared and couldn’t keep himself from blurting out, “Why do you look like that’s a good thing? You don’t think it’s, uh…” he hesitated but had to finish nervously, “cowardly?”
She stopped walking and faced him directly, her expression entirely sober. “Firstly, I appreciate your honesty. But most importantly, no, I don’t think it’s cowardly at all. I think it’s brave.”
He choked on air. “What–how?”
“Do you plan to back out of doing the experiment?” she countered instead of answering.
He jerked back a little. “No! Of course not.”
She gave him another soft look. “‘The brave man is not he who feels no fear, for that were stupid and irrational; But he whose noble soul its fear subdues, And bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from.’”
He had to swallow hard. “Is that poetry?” he asked inanely. It was all he could think to say because his brain had gone blank of everything except for one thought: she thought he was brave. She, who was so bold and so smart she could quote lines of poetry by heart, thought he was brave.
She didn’t laugh. “Yes, by a woman named Joanna Baillie.”
He barely registered the name; it hardly mattered. All that mattered was the way she, Peggy Carter, was looking at him and he realized that for the first time in his life, he felt… tall, if that made any sense. She looked at him as if he was somebody, a man, and one who was worthy of respect. He had the sudden crazy thought that even if this procedure worked and the serum turned him into some kind of super soldier, he couldn’t imagine that he would ever feel more… worthy, more… courageous, than he did right then.
He remembered what Dr. Erskine had said, that the serum would make a good man into a great one. Steve had never in his life even dreamed of thinking that he could be a great man but now, for the first time, he thought that if the serum worked, maybe, just maybe, he actually could be. Because Agent Peggy Carter, the most capable, formidable woman he’d ever met, thought that he was brave–no, more, that he, Steve Rogers, the scrawny kid from Brooklyn, had a “noble soul.” It was the first time anyone had ever said such a thing to him. His mom had told him sometimes that he was brave and stronger than he looked but, well, she was his mom and moms said that kind of thing. This was different.
“I–thanks,” was all he could say, lamely. He wished desperately, not for the first time since meeting Agent Carter, that he was some sort of smooth talker, knew how to talk to a woman at all, but he wasn’t and he didn’t. He was only himself and he had never learned how to talk to a woman, had never needed to.
But somehow, amazingly, Agent Carter didn’t seem to particularly mind. He was quite sure that if she wanted to, she was perfectly capable of coming up with some excuse and leaving him. In his experience at least, limited as it was, girls had no trouble at all avoiding him or ignoring him. And he already knew that Agent Carter was not someone who suffered fools easily or was at all shy about letting her opinions be known. And yet, here she was, walking beside him, as if she really had no wish to be anywhere else.
They weren’t even talking, at least not at the moment, but he was abruptly, irrationally certain that this was still better than any date he had ever been on. Never mind that the day was overcast and rather dreary and they were walking through an army base, which was among the least romantic settings in the world, but none of that mattered. It made no sense at all but at that moment, just walking beside Peggy Carter was happiness enough.
He sensed the curious, not entirely friendly, gazes of many of the other men around. It wasn’t as if the other recruits had ever had any use for him and since he’d been picked for Project Rebirth, their hostility had only solidified and for him to be walking with Agent Carter would add yet another element of envy to their sentiments. He ignored them. Steve was, by now, very used to ignoring most other people’s opinions, had learned the hard way that he couldn’t focus on what other people thought of him, so there were very few people whose opinions he cared about. And Agent Carter was rapidly climbing her way up their ranks–foolishly, he had no doubt. She might see him and even seem to respect him but he still couldn’t, in his wildest dreams, imagine that she, of all women, would ever be interested in him in any romantic sense. And for all he knew, she might already have a fellow she was going steady with, perhaps some brave English soldier, tall and handsome and clever and strong, who deserved her.
“What do your parents think about you joining the army?” she asked, breaking the oddly comfortable silence that had fallen.
He stiffened a little. “They’re both dead.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
For the first time in his memory, she looked discomfited, almost abashed, and it seemed so wrong to see such an expression on her face that he found himself rushing on. “I’m not alone, though. I have a best friend who’s as good as a brother to me and his family is almost like family to me too. My friend just got called up, left a couple days before I got here, actually. So if this experiment works and I really become a soldier, maybe I’ll get to see him, fight beside him.” He counted it as a small victory that he’d managed a complete sentence, a few complete sentences, without stuttering or stammering. Apparently when he forgot himself in wanting to make her feel better, he could, well, talk without sounding like an idiot.
“I hope you will.”
There was another brief pause and he was the one to break it this time, asking, “Can you tell me more about the procedure, what it will involve?”
She made a small rueful little face. “I’m no scientist like Dr. Erskine,” she temporized.
He was abruptly, absurdly sure that she was probably being modest and she knew more about the science than she was admitting.
“But from my understanding, the serum will be injected into your muscles to cause cellular changes, not only increasing strength but also changing your metabolism, and then they’ll use Vita-rays to stimulate growth. If it works, it’s supposed to make a person essentially reach the peak of physical human abilities in strength and speed and abilities so the person will become not just a strong man but the strongest man, not just a fast man but the fastest man.”
“If it works,” he couldn’t help but echo, not quite below his breath.
She winced slightly.
“Has it ever really worked, I mean, on anyone or anything besides Johann Schmidt?”
She hesitated and then answered, her voice low and rather reluctant, “Well, as Dr. Erskine no doubt told you, while it technically worked on Johann Schmidt as far as making him stronger, there were other… unintended consequences, shall we say. After that, Dr. Erskine spent years revising and perfecting the formula but after Schmidt, he was hesitant to try it on another person, but he has experimented some on mice and rats, in much smaller doses, obviously.”
“How did that go?” Although he had the niggling sense that he didn’t really want to hear the answer.
The expression on her face pretty much said it all but after a while, she answered, this time with obvious reluctance, “Not well. The serum… well, it seemed to overload the rats’ systems so most didn’t survive the procedure. A few did, becoming larger, around the size of a small cat, but then, when Dr. Erskine tried to test their abilities, like their stamina or speed, well… they didn’t survive the tests because it seemed like the exertion overwhelmed their hearts so their hearts gave out.”
Steve swallowed hard. “Oh.”
“But then rats are really very different from humans,” she hurriedly went on. “And Dr. Erskine has refined and improved the serum since then. He really is as certain as he can be that the serum is ready now.”
Steve felt his stomach twist but told himself bracingly that there was no reason to think he would suffer a similar fate to the rats. After all, Schmidt had survived, although Steve didn’t like the sound of the “other effects” Dr. Erskine had referred to or the “unintended consequences,” as Agent Carter had phrased it. But Dr. Erskine had admitted that the serum Schmidt had used had not been ready.
He mustered up a faint smile. “Well, nothing in life really comes with guarantees and someone always has to be the first to try anything new.” He had wanted to go to war and fight for his country and that wasn’t a safe thing to do either, as Bucky had pointed out. This was just another type of risk he was taking for the sake of his country and if it worked, well, he could do a lot more to serve.
“Steve, I–” She broke off, hesitated, and then finished, “I really do think it will work. Dr. Erskine is a brilliant man and so is Howard Stark.”
His heart had leaped at the sound of his first name on her lips and then the mention of Howard Stark and more, her praise of him, had his heart dropping, remembering the time he’d seen Stark, the debonair millionaire in a fancy tuxedo that probably cost more money than Steve had ever seen in his life, the way Stark had so confidently kissed that girl on stage, and Steve abruptly wondered if Agent Carter might fancy Stark in that way. She was so smart and so beautiful; if anyone deserved to be with a man who could shower her with all the luxuries in life, it was undoubtedly her.
Whereas Steve… had nothing to offer her. What did he have, after all, except a physically frail body that was no real good to anyone, including his own self, and a little knack with drawing? He liked to think that he was a good man, he tried to be one at least, and he also knew that he was smart enough but in his experience, that wasn’t enough for a woman. And he found it hard to believe that it could be enough for a woman like Agent Carter, who was not only good but was also smart and strong and capable, to say nothing of so beautiful he thought sometimes he could happily stare at her for hours. Agent Carter deserved the best. And Steve was not the best anything.
It was enough that they might, perhaps, become friends. And it was more than enough, more than he had ever expected, that she thought that he was brave, made him feel as if he actually might be as brave as she thought. He didn’t, couldn’t, hope for anything more than that. But for the first time in his life, he wished that he could hope for more.
He managed a small smile. “Well, Dr. Erskine told me the serum is ready and he ought to know.”
She studied him for a moment and then asked, quietly, “Why are you doing this?”
He blinked. “This, as in joining the army, agreeing to do the experiment?”
“Yes, all of it. You know the risks, know you don’t have to do this, and yet you are.”
He met her eyes for a moment. “I don’t like bullies. And what Hitler is doing, it’s bullying, plain and simple, and bullies won’t stop unless someone forces them to stop.” Maybe the reasoning was simplistic; actually, it almost certainly was. He remembered what Dr. Erskine had said about the way the Nazis had invaded their own country first. Politicians, world leaders like Roosevelt and Churchill, or political philosophers or whatever, had a host of more sophisticated reasons and he was sure they all had merit to varying degrees but he was neither a politician nor a philosopher. And what it came down to for him was that he didn’t like bullies and Hitler and his Nazis were bullies.
“But why you?”
Somehow, he didn’t mind the question. Something in her expression, her tone, told him that she wasn’t questioning his choice, his right to make such a choice. She honestly wanted to know. “Other men are going off to war and fighting and dying for this country, the Allied cause,” he hurriedly amended, remembering that she wasn’t American. “What right do I have to do anything less?”
Her lips tipped up ever so faintly. “Good answer.”
His heart jumped all over again as he stared at her and then she glanced away and her expression changed. “Corporal Briggs has brought the car around.”
He turned to look and saw that, yes, there was a car waiting by the gate hut. His stomach seemed to clench but all he said was, “I guess we’d better not keep him waiting.”
They turned and began the walk over to where the car was waiting. He glanced at her as they walked, wanting to tell her… something, that it had been nice talking to her like this, the first actual conversation they’d ever had–for that matter, the first real conversation he’d ever had with a woman–tell her what it meant to him that she thought that he was brave, believed in him. He’d never really imagined being able to talk to a woman or, well, anyone aside from Bucky the way he had with her this morning or laughing with a woman and he couldn’t help but think that if he could talk to other women the way he’d been able to talk to her, at least to a point, then he might not mind spending time with women. Not that any other woman had ever wanted to talk to him before anyway and he hadn’t particularly minded. He minded now because he suddenly wanted to say something, anything, to impress her, to make her smile at him again.
“I–uh–this was nice,” he blurted out. “Thanks for… for talking to me,” he almost stammered and then could have kicked himself again. Oh, yeah, that was really smooth. It was a miracle she wasn’t swooning right at his feet. Idiot!
A faint smile played around the corners of her lips and he, again, had to drag his eyes away, focus on her bright eyes, not that it was any hardship to look at her eyes either. “It was my pleasure, soldier.”
He supposed, guessed, that she was being polite–she had to only be being polite, right?--but his heart still leaped.
He felt her glance and then she said, “In case I don’t have a chance later, I wanted to say… good luck, Steve.”
“I–thanks,” he almost stammered and thought, absurdly, that his name had never sounded better than it did when she said it.
Corporal Briggs gave Agent Carter a somewhat perfunctory salute when they arrived and ignored Steve, which didn’t surprise him but then Steve was used to being ignored.
The first hour or so of the drive–Steve’s best guess was that the drive to Brooklyn from Camp Lehigh would take roughly an hour and half–passed in silence. The presence of Corporal Briggs was somewhat inhibiting and then, Steve found his nerves ratcheting up ever tighter with every mile that passed. His knee started to jig up and down and he caught her glance at it and forcibly stilled his knee but then had to release his nervous tension by opening and closing his hand, although he carefully did so with the hand on the other side of Agent Carter, out of her line of sight.
Oddly, paradoxically, or perhaps not, he found he started to feel a little better the closer they got to Brooklyn as the streets became more familiar. Maybe there really was something to the feeling that he was going home, as Agent Carter had said.
From the route they were taking, this laboratory wasn’t quite in his old neighborhood but it wasn’t far from it either, maybe a handful of blocks from where his old elementary school was and another handful of blocks away from where Bucky’s folks lived.
He darted a glance at Agent Carter and then turned to look out the window and found himself saying, “I know this neighborhood.” He made a gesture with his hand. “I got beat up in that alley… and that parking lot… and behind that diner.” He broke off, belatedly wondering what had possessed him to tell her such a thing. He had only been thinking of telling her that he knew the neighborhood but then had heard his own voice continuing. What was it about her that scrambled his brains so and made him sound like such an idiot? He might try not to lie but surely there had to be a happy medium between not lying and blurting out such embarrassing truths. Or maybe, he suddenly thought, it wasn’t only that she made his brain go blank but also that he, well, somehow felt that he could tell her such things. He’d already admitted to being terrified at the prospect of the procedure and not only had she not laughed at him or condemned him, she thought he was brave. For that matter, she had never laughed at him and God knows, over the course of basic training, she had seen him look ridiculous plenty of times. All the other recruits had laughed at him, and even Colonel Phillips had been mocking in his own gruff way. But not her. She had never mocked him and because of that, he felt as if he could tell her things, as if he could trust her.
He looked down at his small, skinny hands, so delicate that he’d more than once heard people mocking them as being little girls’ hands. And wondered, again, if the serum would work and what it would be like not to be so small and weak.
“Did you have something against running away?”
He shook his head, not looking at her. “You start running, they never let you stop. But if you stand up, push back, they can’t say no forever, right?” He bit back the urge to say that she probably understood that too. He knew enough of the world and had seen enough of the attitudes of the other recruits to know that she had to have faced the same sort of ridicule and rejection herself. He could see it in the way she carried herself, the set of her jaw, the way she usually tended to look as if she were constantly primed to fight to prove her place in the world. He recognized the look, the feeling, but it seemed presumptuous somehow to imply that he had anything in common with her, who had bowled him over from the first time he’d seen her with her strength and her determination and her cleverness.
“I know a little of what that’s like, to have every door shut in your face,” she admitted and he glanced at her, his heart thumping. She had seen it too, that they had this in common.
He thought, again, that he wanted to know everything about her, wanted to know what had brought her here. “I guess I just don’t know why you’d want to join the army if you’re a beautiful dame,” he blurted out and then inwardly cringed as he belatedly heard how that sounded. “Or a beautiful–uh, a woman–an agent–not a dame,” he corrected, almost stumbling over his own tongue. He felt heat rush into his cheeks until he was sure his very ears were red. “You are beautiful but uh–” He broke off, mortified. No, that wasn’t any better.
She turned to him and he darted a look at her but she still, somehow, didn’t look as if she were laughing at him, although there was the faintest curve to her lips. “You have no idea how to talk to a woman, do you?”
He scoffed a little. Yes, he’d made that very obvious. He might as well have hung a sign around his neck announcing, I’ve never talked to a woman before. “I’m pretty sure this is the longest conversation I’ve had with one.” He knew this was the longest conversation he’d ever had with a woman. He looked down at his hands again. “Women aren’t exactly lining up to dance with a guy they might step on,” he admitted in a low voice.
He felt her glance but didn’t dare meet it. “You must have danced,” she commented softly.
He shrugged a little. “Asking a woman to dance always seemed so… terrifying. And the past few years, it just didn’t seem to matter that much.” He’d wondered a few times how Bucky could still be so interested in girls, in arranging double dates, when the world was at war and the news from the war was getting grimmer by the day. And then, even when he’d gone on some double dates, dragged by Bucky, the girls’ chatter had seemed so inane, so utterly disconnected from what was going on in the world that there had been moments when he’d almost found himself wondering a few times if the whole war were somehow a product of his own imagination. “Figured I’d wait.”
For about the thousandth time since meeting Agent Carter, he marveled at how different she was from every girl–women–he’d ever met. It was almost hard to believe that Agent Carter was a member of the same species as all the women he’d met before, she was so different.
“For what?”
He lifted his shoulder into a half-shrug. “The right partner.” A woman he actually wanted to talk to. A woman who was interesting. A woman who would actually look at him and see someone worth knowing. A woman like… her. It occurred to him with a strange sense of surprise–and something that wasn’t surprise at all–that he’d like to dance with her one day. If he could, if she would agree.
But then before he could even begin to come to terms with that thought, Corporal Briggs had turned the car into the curb and parked outside of an antique store. Steve blinked, any thoughts on dancing, dancing with Agent Carter, completely derailed. Was this it? He didn’t see anything remotely resembling a laboratory. He just saw various store fronts.
He glanced at Agent Carter and at her small gesture, pushed open the car door and stepped out onto the sidewalk followed by her. “What are we doing here?”
She met his eyes briefly. “Follow me.”
He let out his breath and did. Well, it looked like this was the place, somehow. He darted a quick glance back at the street, the sky, wondering a little sickly if this was the last time he would see the sky and then pushed the thought from his mind. No, no, he couldn’t think like that, wouldn’t think like that.
He focused on Agent Carter, heard her voice in his mind saying, I think it’s brave, pictured her face, the way she had looked at him and smiled at him earlier. She–the smartest, strongest, most capable woman he had ever met–believed in him.
He barely registered the seemingly innocuous words the store’s proprietress exchanged with Agent Carter, only followed Agent Carter into the back room, and then stiffened as the bookshelf opened to reveal a hallway, a bare institutional-looking hallway. This was the laboratory. They really were here. This was the moment. He set his jaw, straightened his shoulders, and fell into step beside her, into what he hoped would mark the start of a new life. He could do this. He would do this. He could not, would not, let her or his own self down because this was his chance, the chance he had wanted and dreamed about for so long.
~The End~