ten_fwd | First Entrance

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First Entrance

He'd been to visit Peggy when he got the call from Director Fury to check in. He was making it a routine, every Tuesday afternoon when he wasn't on a mission. Then it became every Tuesday afternoon and every Saturday morning. It's funny how long it took him to work up the nerve to see her, and now it's all he can do to stay away. She's still his best gal.

He parks his bike in his usual spot in the underground garage next to the Triskelion, shoulders the bag with his gear in it, and starts walking to the elevators. He's wondering what kind of mission Fury's sending him on this time when the sun catches his eyes ... wait, where's that coming from?

He blinks hard, and when he opens his eyes ... this is not the elevator. This isn't the garage, heck, this isn't even D.C. He's in a room, some kind of restaurant or bar. People are milling about, some in uniform and others in civvies, and outside the windows ... jeepers, that's a lot of stars.

His hand tightens on the strap of his bag and he plants his feet shoulder's width apart, jaw set. He isn't sure what kind of trick this is, but if he doesn't get answers soon he's going to start demanding them.

[ooc: Hello! Steve is pre-Winter Soldier, but only just, and he has entered the room in civvies. Slacks, button-up, leather jacket, boots, his usual affair. His cowl is in the bag, along with his shield and a few other things, but by all accounts he looks like an average guy. Well, an average tall, strong guy. Any takers welcome!]

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She blinks. Partly because she doesn't understand the metaphor--what stick is he talking about? Does he have one hidden somewhere?--and partly because she can't tell who she should believe.

Steve is the easy, obvious choice. He's going against everything she's been told for her entire life. "But isn't that what the Allies are doing too?" she asks.

He purses his lips. "Maybe as far as Germany is concerned, but we didn't start the war, and it wasn't until after Hitler's Nazis started making claims to other countries that the Allies got involved. We weren't the aggressors."

Germany, Japan, all hit them when they were weak, poor, and starving.

"So that makes it okay for you to kill us all?" she says.

Her brow furrows as she shakes her head. "How do I know if you're telling the truth or just trying to lie to me?"

Frankly, she doesn't. Steve's already told her that he doesn't want to kill anyone, but she keeps circling back. He can't blame her, maybe she's seen some things she'd rather not talk about, but he also doesn't know if he can get through to her. When things are so deeply entrenched, no amount of charisma can make your words heard.

"No, it's not," he says quietly. "I want the dying to stop. Nobody should have to get the telegram telling them their loved ones are dead. Doesn't matter which side they're fighting on. I promise you, Sinthia, I'm not lying to you. But whether or not you believe me is up to you."

Oh, she's seen--and done--worse than what Steve probably wants to think about, and the plain fact is she knows it. Somewhere, deep in her that she doesn't talk or think about and tries not to show, she knows they're on the wrong side of the war. And she's always been told the Americans will want her dead the minute they learn her skills.

"I don't know which one of you to believe," she says quietly, face still pinched in concentration. "I know it's not good things they tell me to do, but...they said it would be okay in the end. that it would end the war quicker." And now Steve's telling her something different.

So she's one of Schmidt's experiments, then. God, he wonders how old she was when the scoundrel started testing on her. What kind of things has he trained her to do? What kind of person has he encouraged her to become? Steve feels a knot in his stomach, and for a quick moment he has to look down, gather himself, and fight the repugnance he feels. For Schmidt, not for the kid.

"Did they tell you how it would end the war?" he asks. "By making peace, or by destroying all opposition? Sometimes, the important thing isn't how fast or how slow something happens, but how the most good is done when it's through, how both sides win and lose, and how proud you can be with your part in it all."

"No," she says softly, looking down to her lap. There's this irrevocable feeling that she's done something awful and now she has to pay the price, only she hasn't even done a quarter of what her father wants. She wonders if Steve knows about her, and what she can do, and he's just trying to make her admit it.

It makes her feel even more lost, because she wishes she could, but she doesn't know what happens yet.

"He tells me I should be proud all the time. Because I'm different." And superior. But she won't get into that.

You are deluded, Captain.
You pretend to be a simple soldier.
But in reality you are just afraid to admit,
...that we have left humanity behind.

He clenches his jaw, fingers pressed into the table. He doesn't want to upset her, but he can hear it in her voice and see it in the way she avoids his eyes. It isn't her fault. Even though he doesn't know anything about her or what she's done, in this moment he couldn't be more sure of anything. It isn't her fault.

"Sinthia -- I'm from 2014," he says carefully. "Do you understand what that means?"

"You know how the war ends," she says, not lifting her head but to look sideways, away from Steve.

"You know what happens." Whether she lives or dies, who wins, what the world is like afterwards. "Don't you?"

He isn't going to lie to her.

"Yes," he says quietly. "But it also means the fight is over. You and me don't have to be on opposite sides here."

He really doesn't want to hurt her, or see her hurt anybody else. If he can help her understand that, maybe everything will be OK. It still leaves the question of why they sent him here, and sent her after him, but he's taking this one problem at a time.

"Do we lose?" she asks, as if she's fully invested as one of HYDRA, even though she's never expressed desire, particularly, to be one of them. Sinthia's never expressed the desire to not be, either, though to herself she thinks that even if it was an option it would be extremely foolish given her parentage.

She won't look at him, studying her shoes or the floor instead, or even the pores on the backs of her hands, stalling for time to think and finding herself tired of the exhaustive process.

Steve watches her, jaw tense, vaguely sorry for what he's about to say.

"Yes."

If Steve watches carefully, he may be able to see the terms she comes to with accepting this: it's shocking, yes, to think they lose, but even past that she has worries about how it happens, because she doesn't think her father is the kind of man who'll surrender even if he's overwhelmed.

But even if he had given up, what would that mean for her? Sinthia isn't sure she wants to travel down that road of contemplating her own death, because it makes her feel faintly sick.

"Okay." That's all she really can say; anything more and she feels like a traitor. Not that she isn't starting to have that concern now.

He won't say it isn't worrying on more than one level watching her reaction, but it could have been worse. If their roles were reversed, he'd be kicking, screaming, and biting his way out of this conversation, damning it all to hell. She's quiet, and rather than look angry she just looks ... scared.

"Listen to me, Sinthia," he begins again, as gently as he can muster. "I know, you and me, we weren't ever given the chance to know one another outside of being enemies. You were probably told a lot of things about Captain America and the Allies that makes me a pretty scary guy to be alone with, and you haven't got any reason to trust me. But I can tell you that if the Commandos knew there were women and children in any of the bases we hit, we would have tried to get them out. Our mission was to take out your weapons and your factories so you couldn't fight back, not to murder innocents. Now, you and me, we've got this chance here to find out what the other person's all about. I'm not going to hurt you, I promise. If you think you can trust me, get to know me, then maybe we can even be friends."

He holds out his hand again, not much different from the first time he did at the beginning of this conversation. He's still trying to tell her they're on equal footing, that everything's going to be okay. "You want to take that chance with me?"

She leans back when he offers her his hand again, looking up with flat blue-flecked eyes and a turned-down mouth that leave little room for guesswork in gauging her mood. She's wary, on high alert and is, frankly, only not kicking and screaming because she's never done it.

Sinthia's never had an emotional enough reaction to anything to necessitate it. But because it seems rude to just stay reticently silent int he face of Steve's earnestness, she sighs, and answers. "I don't know if we can be friends," she says. "I don't want to hurt you unless I have to, but I don't know anything about you other than what my father has told me about the Americans. And I still don't know if you're lying to make me defect."

She'll be honest to a fault about that. It's a major reservation of hers. And she eyes his hand, sucking her bottom lip between her teeth as she reaches out to take it; she can't help but feel disadvantaged here, because even with the ability to blink away she doesn't know the layout of the ship and doesn't want to get herself into a space she can't get out of again. "There were no other children or women. Just so you know."

It's disheartening when she repeats his words. He figures there's nothing more for him to say, not even when she says she doesn't want to hurt him unless she has to. It means she thinks she can, and if she's one of Schmidt's experiments, there's no saying she can't. He wants to know what she's capable of, but he can guess how well it would go down if he asked her outright.

So he's ready to pull his hand back when she cautiously takes it, surprising him again. She's smart. It's always better taking an opponent's hand in a sign of good faith, even a contrived one, than it is spitting in their face. He'll take what he can get. "Thank you. For telling me."

It is a relief. Steve knows the choices he makes aren't always the best ones, but he believes they're the right ones. The idea of killing innocents is one that would never sit well with him. It would eat him up for the rest of his life.

"Maybe we can't be friends, then," he says. "But as long as you promise not to hurt anyone here, I can promise that I won't force you to do anything you don't want to do. If you want to talk, we can talk."

"I won't hurt anyone," she says, serious because she hates hurting people. The thought of what she can do--the memory of pulling her hand out of someone's chest with a wet squish even though she hated it and hadn't looked still made her want to retch.

"But we can talk. If you tell me what happened when we lost."

The tone of her voice and the way she looks tells Steve all he needs to know. She's practically green, all of her earlier threats against him replaced with the look of a kid who never wanted this kind of power heaped on her in the first place. It gives him enough confidence to place his hand on her shoulder, heavy and sure.

"I believe you," he says. He doesn't care what year it is for her, or where they are, or what will happen when they get put back where they came from; in this moment, he makes a silent promise that she won't have to hurt anyone else ever again. "You want to talk about the war now? Or after we find the people in charge here?"

"Later," she says. She doesn't want to talk about it at all right now. Not until she can look up who he is. And what happened.

Her shoulder dips under the weight of his hand, and Sinthia takes a deep but gently shuddering breath to steady herself. She really doesn't want to be sick.

"I don't want to have to talk about it at all."

"You don't have to," he says. Under his name in the Smithsonian, it says 'WAR HERO'. But Steve still wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, delirious and confused by his own bed, more unnerved that it's quiet than if there were bombs going off. She doesn't have to talk about any of it if she doesn't want to. "You just make up your mind on what you want, and I'll be here."

He pauses before straightening up, and offers her a helping hand to get down from the table if she wants it. "Do you still want to come with me?"

Once she's down off the table, Sinthia eyes the distance to Steve's shoulders again, and looks down at the floor. It's a very nice, very solid floor. It's a good floor. She likes it.

"Can I just walk beside you?" she asks. Steve is awfully tall. "For now."

She doesn't want to talk about forced practice with her abilities; not because she doesn't like to use them, but because remembering the lengths to which she's gone and been pushed make her feel at best nervous and at worst sick. Beneath those feelings she understands the reasons why, because there's no point in making a weapon without testing its limits, but when that weapon can remember...it adds a new kind of trauma to the playing field.

One corner of Steve's mouth rucks up in something like a smile.

"Yeah, you can," he says, offering her his hand. He's not sure what to make of the kid anymore, but it's hard to look at her like a threat. Still, he'll keep her away from his throat, and close to the ground in case she feels like running. He wouldn't blame her.

"I meant what I said," he says quietly. "You and I can stick together until we figure out what's going on. It's gonna be okay."

It's a lot to digest. In the span of one conversation she's gone from sure they're friends, to sure they're enemies, to now quite vehemently unsure of everything, and the changes show on her face. It's tiring, it's upsetting, it's disorienting.

If she knew what shellshock was she might be tempted to use that as a description. It's a long time between when she takes his hand gently, and when she finally says something--unknowingly Steve has probably set her back talking only when she's spoken to, when she'd just started coming out of her shell and being assertive.

"It doesn't feel like it's okay. We're going to lose, and I don't know what happens." To me is the unspoken part, important in the distinction it makes. But Steve is probably smart enough to guess that, or would be even if Sinthia didn't add on at the last minute--"Do you have to kill me, Steve? In your war?"

He is smart enough, and fast enough to pick up on what's not being said until she comes out and says it.

"No," he answers immediately, vehemently firm. "No. Nobody is going to kill you."

He stops and crouches to get on her level, standing in front of her with a hand on each arm. His brow is deeply furrowed when he reaches up and strokes her hair, the tenderness coming without thought. It's already done by the time he stops to wonder if anyone has ever been tender with her, if she'd even know why he was doing what he did.

"You're here with me, Sinthia. You're safe," he says, hoping she can let herself believe that. "The war is a whole galaxy behind you now. Your fate is whatever you make it. Johann can't get to you here."

He doesn't know that for sure. He couldn't. But with ever fiber of his being, he'll will it to be so.

Have you ever seen a housecat, Steve? How, even when they're angry and unhappy they'll find their person and knead out their distress until they can relax?

Sinthia is, in that respect, much like the metaphorical housecat in that instant when Steve touches her hair, brows uncreasing and face relaxing a bit; it's something only Johann ever does, touch her head like that, and while he's not nearly so tender as Steve is with her the idea is the same. "I'm sorry," she murmurs. "I want to trust you. But I had to ask."

First Entrance

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