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petroniaI mean, while you guys are at it. XD
***
SHIELD finds Steve an apartment in Brooklyn. Not in Midwood or Bed-Stuy -- as bewilderingly unrecognizable now as the Wonder Stories fantasy that is Times Square -- but the top floor of a renovated red-brick rowhouse in Brooklyn Heights, with a view of the Bridge through broad paned windows. The neighbourhood remains well off, it seems, and thus better preserved; though, by the same token, Steve was never familiar with it. It’s a combination he can just about stand.
Most mornings he’s out of bed before dawn, eats and showers and watches the sunrise. The sky would lighten gradually, silhouetting the Manhattan skyline, then break over the skyscrapers in a transmuting flood of rose-gold light. Further into the bay, Lady Liberty stands immutable, her raised arm blurred softly blue by distance. All right, he thinks, like he does the first time they clear him to wander the future of his own city unsupervised, and he ends up in the land’s end of Battery Park, gazing out seaward: all right, there’s one thing, at least. Then he goes running.
For the first few weeks he does nothing but run. He doesn’t want to sleep, doesn’t want to sit still, and this makes it easier: narrows requirements down to dodging traffic and relearning the grid. It’s a popular hobby now, they tell him, and he finds the marked paths -- starts on the Promenade, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan Island, then heads down to Battery Park and up the Esplanade. Then back. He gets the round trip done before morning traffic and barely breaks a sweat, so eventually he just keeps going. The upper bound becomes 14th Street, then 34th Street, then 42nd Street. He notes an ugly glass behemoth being built -- or possibly rebuilt -- on Park Avenue, standing isolated from its peers behind Grand Central Station; every few runs it seems to add another floor. He goes the other way, too, across the old Navy Yards into Williamsburg, or circling south around Prospect Park.
SHIELD tells him they’ve found Peggy, eventually. That she’s still alive, still alert, though very fragile; that he can choose to contact her, if he wants. He thinks they might have known from the first, but have been waiting for him to achieve some external semblance of equilibrium. Did they assume it would hurt him, he wonders. As if some stubborn part of him might believe, but for the signs of age on her living face, that everything he’s experienced since waking has been a lie; that the Peggy he remembers is out there somewhere, young and strong and beautiful and free?
They would have been right.
He goes to see her. He wanted -- he wants that very much.
Afterward, he hits the gym.
SHIELD assigns him a psychologist. To be precise, at first they send one to speak to him, without telling him what it’s about. Dr. Karnathy is an older gentleman, with spectacles and a quiet, attentive manner; he reminds Steve immediately of Dr. Erskine. A kind man, a good listener, even a father figure -- someone with whom it’s not a hardship to sit and chat for an hour or two a week. SHIELD’s studied his file. But Steve recognizes the interviews for what they are, and he doesn’t want to talk.
SHIELD comes clean, and asks him to try. Tries to order him, to be precise. But Steve has a sense of what the sessions are meant to accomplish, and he doesn’t think they’ll do that. He also -- though he mentions nothing about it to anyone -- very much doubts SHIELD’s assurances of confidentiality.
“It’s regulation, soldier,” says Fury. “More to the point, it’s in your best interest. I’m not saying you’re a liability, but no matter what you think now, it’s going to take you more than the couple of months you’ve had to adjust. Even if you have the big picture down, the details’ll trip you up. Think of it as a medical followup.”
He doesn’t, however, sound unsympathetic. It occurs to Steve that, were their positions to be reversed, he would be more likely to see Fury chew gravel than acquiesce in good grace to a head-shrinking.
So he says, “If you want me to adjust, give me more training. Not just what to say or what to do; I want to know what things mean. I don’t want to talk about what it feels like to have missed all that time, and I don’t want to read about it in a book. I want to know what it would have felt like to live it.”
It’s more than he meant to let out when he opened his mouth. Fury leans back in his chair, eyebrows knotting; but in thought, not irritation. There is silence, and Steve senses enough to let it stand.
“Tall order, Rogers,” Fury says, finally. “I’ll see what we can do. But if we find you a therapist according to your specifications, you go. Understood?”
***
Two weeks later a SHIELD agent he’s seen once or twice tracks Steve down in the gym, and ushers in - with no particular ceremony - a tall, very thin woman in her fifties. He grabs a towel and wipes his face and hands off hurriedly.
“This is Ms. Nannerl Goldstein,” says the agent. What was his name -- Sitwell? “Ms. Goldstein, Captain Steve Rogers.”
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Steve says. He’s conscious of the sweat plastering his t-shirt to his back, of being severely underdressed for female company. He can’t get fully used to the casualness, the nakedness, but no one else seems to care. The woman just smiles and extends her hand.
“Likewise, Captain,” she says. “And please, call me Nan. Unless that makes you uncomfortable, in which case call me whatever you like.”
“Thank you,” Steve says, a little startled, and shakes her hand. Her fingers feel bony and slight, within his, but her grip is steady. She has a pleasantly lined face - someone who both smokes and laughs a great deal, he thinks - and long brown hair pulled back and plaited. Her eyes are blue. The name - German? Perhaps Jewish. She sounds American, a vague, unidentifiable Northeastern. And Germany, he reminds himself, is no longer an enemy.
"Ms. Goldstein," says possibly-Sitwell, "has been with us on a part-time consultant basis for nearly eight years now. She works primarily with new recruits, but at times we've also called her in on mandates where she had to advise SHIELD operatives on more specific missions, so you can assume she has clearance up to level five." He looked at the woman, then back at Steve. "We have her pegged as a subject matter expert on non-verbal communication. Fury thought she might help you conduct your deep dive into the last sixty-odd years of data, as it were."
"Ma'am," Steve says as a placeholder, attempting to parse this flood of organization-speak. The woman smiles.
"If you're wondering about my day job, Captain," she says, "I'm a modern dance choreographer."
The SHIELD man shrugs, slightly. Steve has noticed that they tend to be men and women of vastly elastic composure.
[cont.]
***
SHIELD finds Steve an apartment in Brooklyn. Not in Midwood or Bed-Stuy -- as bewilderingly unrecognizable now as the Wonder Stories fantasy that is Times Square -- but the top floor of a renovated red-brick rowhouse in Brooklyn Heights, with a view of the Bridge through broad paned windows. The neighbourhood remains well off, it seems, and thus better preserved; though, by the same token, Steve was never familiar with it. It’s a combination he can just about stand.
Most mornings he’s out of bed before dawn, eats and showers and watches the sunrise. The sky would lighten gradually, silhouetting the Manhattan skyline, then break over the skyscrapers in a transmuting flood of rose-gold light. Further into the bay, Lady Liberty stands immutable, her raised arm blurred softly blue by distance. All right, he thinks, like he does the first time they clear him to wander the future of his own city unsupervised, and he ends up in the land’s end of Battery Park, gazing out seaward: all right, there’s one thing, at least. Then he goes running.
For the first few weeks he does nothing but run. He doesn’t want to sleep, doesn’t want to sit still, and this makes it easier: narrows requirements down to dodging traffic and relearning the grid. It’s a popular hobby now, they tell him, and he finds the marked paths -- starts on the Promenade, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan Island, then heads down to Battery Park and up the Esplanade. Then back. He gets the round trip done before morning traffic and barely breaks a sweat, so eventually he just keeps going. The upper bound becomes 14th Street, then 34th Street, then 42nd Street. He notes an ugly glass behemoth being built -- or possibly rebuilt -- on Park Avenue, standing isolated from its peers behind Grand Central Station; every few runs it seems to add another floor. He goes the other way, too, across the old Navy Yards into Williamsburg, or circling south around Prospect Park.
SHIELD tells him they’ve found Peggy, eventually. That she’s still alive, still alert, though very fragile; that he can choose to contact her, if he wants. He thinks they might have known from the first, but have been waiting for him to achieve some external semblance of equilibrium. Did they assume it would hurt him, he wonders. As if some stubborn part of him might believe, but for the signs of age on her living face, that everything he’s experienced since waking has been a lie; that the Peggy he remembers is out there somewhere, young and strong and beautiful and free?
They would have been right.
He goes to see her. He wanted -- he wants that very much.
Afterward, he hits the gym.
SHIELD assigns him a psychologist. To be precise, at first they send one to speak to him, without telling him what it’s about. Dr. Karnathy is an older gentleman, with spectacles and a quiet, attentive manner; he reminds Steve immediately of Dr. Erskine. A kind man, a good listener, even a father figure -- someone with whom it’s not a hardship to sit and chat for an hour or two a week. SHIELD’s studied his file. But Steve recognizes the interviews for what they are, and he doesn’t want to talk.
SHIELD comes clean, and asks him to try. Tries to order him, to be precise. But Steve has a sense of what the sessions are meant to accomplish, and he doesn’t think they’ll do that. He also -- though he mentions nothing about it to anyone -- very much doubts SHIELD’s assurances of confidentiality.
“It’s regulation, soldier,” says Fury. “More to the point, it’s in your best interest. I’m not saying you’re a liability, but no matter what you think now, it’s going to take you more than the couple of months you’ve had to adjust. Even if you have the big picture down, the details’ll trip you up. Think of it as a medical followup.”
He doesn’t, however, sound unsympathetic. It occurs to Steve that, were their positions to be reversed, he would be more likely to see Fury chew gravel than acquiesce in good grace to a head-shrinking.
So he says, “If you want me to adjust, give me more training. Not just what to say or what to do; I want to know what things mean. I don’t want to talk about what it feels like to have missed all that time, and I don’t want to read about it in a book. I want to know what it would have felt like to live it.”
It’s more than he meant to let out when he opened his mouth. Fury leans back in his chair, eyebrows knotting; but in thought, not irritation. There is silence, and Steve senses enough to let it stand.
“Tall order, Rogers,” Fury says, finally. “I’ll see what we can do. But if we find you a therapist according to your specifications, you go. Understood?”
***
Two weeks later a SHIELD agent he’s seen once or twice tracks Steve down in the gym, and ushers in - with no particular ceremony - a tall, very thin woman in her fifties. He grabs a towel and wipes his face and hands off hurriedly.
“This is Ms. Nannerl Goldstein,” says the agent. What was his name -- Sitwell? “Ms. Goldstein, Captain Steve Rogers.”
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Steve says. He’s conscious of the sweat plastering his t-shirt to his back, of being severely underdressed for female company. He can’t get fully used to the casualness, the nakedness, but no one else seems to care. The woman just smiles and extends her hand.
“Likewise, Captain,” she says. “And please, call me Nan. Unless that makes you uncomfortable, in which case call me whatever you like.”
“Thank you,” Steve says, a little startled, and shakes her hand. Her fingers feel bony and slight, within his, but her grip is steady. She has a pleasantly lined face - someone who both smokes and laughs a great deal, he thinks - and long brown hair pulled back and plaited. Her eyes are blue. The name - German? Perhaps Jewish. She sounds American, a vague, unidentifiable Northeastern. And Germany, he reminds himself, is no longer an enemy.
"Ms. Goldstein," says possibly-Sitwell, "has been with us on a part-time consultant basis for nearly eight years now. She works primarily with new recruits, but at times we've also called her in on mandates where she had to advise SHIELD operatives on more specific missions, so you can assume she has clearance up to level five." He looked at the woman, then back at Steve. "We have her pegged as a subject matter expert on non-verbal communication. Fury thought she might help you conduct your deep dive into the last sixty-odd years of data, as it were."
"Ma'am," Steve says as a placeholder, attempting to parse this flood of organization-speak. The woman smiles.
"If you're wondering about my day job, Captain," she says, "I'm a modern dance choreographer."
The SHIELD man shrugs, slightly. Steve has noticed that they tend to be men and women of vastly elastic composure.
[cont.]
no subject
Date: 2012-07-27 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-27 05:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-28 02:53 am (UTC)The neighbourhood remains well off, it seems, and thus better preserved; though, by the same token, Steve was never familiar with it. It’s a combination he can just about stand.
And the part about Sgt. Fury chewing gravel if their positions were reversed. Also the part about feeling underdressed for female company.
No clue about the NYC parts, though I can tell you that's a pretty heroic run (in both directions). But then, Captain America is a superhero.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-28 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-28 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-29 02:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-28 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-29 02:14 am (UTC)