1,847A/N
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Now, on with the election-day escapism:
Steve Rogers woke up, and was extremely confused about that. The last thing he remembered was crashing a plane into the ocean, then darkness. Now he's waking up to what? A new ceiling, no pain, and the game was on the radio. It was surreal, and felt inherently wrong.
He sat up slowly, trying to decide if this was a dream or not, while the announcer called out… something he had seen with his own eyes back in '41.
He had been to that game.
An audible crunch, and the sound of someone chewing had him jumping up into a fighting stance. Sitting in a chair by his bed was a young man in a leather jacket, munching away on an apple without a care in the world. A chair that Steve would have sworn was empty three seconds prior.
"Heyo, Steve-o." He said behind a mouthful of apple. "You good? Seem a bit jumpy."
"Where am I?" Steve asked.
"New York." His guest responded, and took another bite.
"Where am I, really." Steve insisted.
"New York." The young man repeated with a grin. "Yeah this whole smoke and mirrors thing was dumb, but they didn't want to freak you out."
Steve forced himself to relax, slightly. "Freak me out about what?"
"I'll let the lady explain." He paused. "Or probably Nick, since he's no doubt pissed I'm here."
"Who-" Steve's head snapped to the door as a nurse walked in. A nurse who froze immediately upon seeing his guest. Said guest just waved at her and kept munching on his apple.
"Um." Steve watched as she tried to gather herself, obvious to even him that her script had just been tossed out a window. "Captain Rogers, and… sir, I don't think we've met?"
"We're in New York. Broadway is right there. Come on lady, keep character a bit better."
Steve went back to thinking this was a weird dream. His body was probably still submerged somewhere in the arctic, and this was just the last synapses firing in his brain.
That was until his hackles raised again when the nurse pressed a button on a remote she tried to hide.
"Cool it, Cap." His guest interjected. "She's just panicking a lit- OK, a lot, she's panicking a lot, but no one's here to hurt'cha. Even the guys with guns outside." He waved his half-eaten apple lazily at the door. "Let's just wait for Nicky-poo to show up, and I'll take you on a tour of the city." He tossed another apple at him. "Take a load off."
Steve tensed at the "guys with guns" part, but caught the apple, wondering where exactly the young man had been keeping it. "Nicky-poo?"
"That would probably be me." Said the voice of a man as he opened the door. He definitely looked intimidating, with the eyepatch and all black get-up. "Call me that again, though, and I'll shoot you."
Steve couldn't pick up a single thing about "Nicky-poo." His face was entirely closed off. No expression, no emotion.
"I had this whole plan, you know." Nicky-poo began. "We were going to take it slow, ease you into it all, Cap. Then this absolute annoyance shows up and makes me spill my coffee everywhere." He waved a hand at Mr. Apple.
Steve glanced back over him, and sure enough, there was a coffee stain down the side of the man's pant leg.
"Annoyance? Me?" His first guest looked affronted.
"Oh so you're talking to me, now?" Eyepatch snarked at Apple. "Given up on your stalkerish tendencies?"
Apple huffed. "Excuse you. I'm a delight."
"Well if you could so delightfully fuck off, I'll happily talk to you later."
Steve got a distinct whiff of livid annoyance off of the man's previously blank face. He was pretty sure that 'talk' meant something more like 'torture,' as well.
Apple hummed. "Can't do that. I promised a tour." He looked over at Steve. "Also, probably not torture. He just wants to lock me in a room and ask a lot of questions."
Steve was one hundred percent sure he hadn't spoken that last bit aloud. The idea that this was a dream wormed its way up again.
"I've lived in New York my entire life. I think I would know my way around it." Steve said instead of addressing the young man's apparent ability to read minds, only for that to get both of his guests staring at him.
"Heh." Apple chuckled. "You're in for a treat."
"Shut the hell up, Quill. We'll get to that."
The apparently named 'Quill' gasped, and grinned widely. "Oh my god, Nick! You know my name!"
Nick gave him the most deadpan stare that Steve had ever seen. "I did my homework." Then sighed. "No idea why you look so young, though."
Quill shrugged. "Magic rock turned me into a kid. Been growing back up, since."
"Mind answering some questions about that?" Nick asked, a demand on the tip of his tongue, but not expressed.
"Classified." Quill rejected.
Nick's eye blinked. "How in the shi-"
"What's going on? Who are you people? And where am I?" Steve broke in.
"That first one's going to take a minute. Get to that in a bit." Quill answered immediately. "I'm a space wizard - and also possibly a god, Nick's a super-secret super-spy, and I keep telling you we're in New York."
Nick's eye twitched, but Steve kept going. "So a wizard, a spy, and a soldier are in a room. You can tell why I think this is all a bad joke, right?" He was ignoring the "god" tidbit. There was only one god.
"My name is Nick Fury." The man said through clenched teeth. He was losing hold of his unflappable demeanor. "I am the director of SHIELD, a global organization dedicated to protecting humanity from all kinds of threats."
"Super-secret super-spy." Quill stage whispered.
"This gremlin," Nick continued, "Is Nathan Quill. He was abducted by aliens back in the eighties, and then mysteriously showed back up on the planet - with a bunch of 'magic' under his belt - and has since made that everyone's problem." He said 'magic' with air quotes.
"Space wizard." Nathan confirmed in another whisper.
"And." Nick paused, glaring at Nathan. "You are, in fact, in New York."
Steve turned to Nathan and studied him. "So you're what? Sixty?"
Nathan blinked. "Uh, no? Like half that. Or possibly closing on seventy depending on what you're counting."
Steve's head tilted, and proceeded to ignore the second half of that. He was ignoring a lot of what this guy said, now that he thought about it. "But he said you were born in the eighties?"
"Ah." Nick looked annoyed with himself. "Not the eighteen-eighties, Cap. Let's go for a walk." He opened the door, and looked expectantly at Steve.
The next ten minutes felt like he had been abducted by aliens, like apparently Nathan had. As soon as they cleared the room, it was immediately obvious that the entire thing had been a facade, meant entirely to make him feel more at home.
The rest of the building, however, was sleek and monolithic. Straight lines and recessed lights. Doors made little chiming sounds when ID cards were held up to them, only to open under their own power. People in the hallways held small plastic bricks up to their ears, and held conversations with… ghosts? Maybe?
Wizards and aliens were apparently real, so…?
So far, the only thing he was familiar with was the elevator, and even that was a much smoother ride than he was expecting.
It also chimed before opening under its own power.
Their destination, though. A large room on the twenty-fifth floor with massive, floor-to-ceiling windows, with a direct look down into Time Square. And it could only be Time Square.
The now familiar sound of a crunch and chewing registered in his ears, as Nathan munched away on another apple, reminding him of the one he still held in his hand.
"Welcome to the year 2011, Cap." Nick began. "You've been asleep for a long time."
Steve didn't collapse into one of the office chairs behind him, but it was a near thing.
"Try the apple, Steve-o. It'll make you feel better." Nathan said calmly.
It was a really good apple.
Nick Fury sat at his desk, having just gotten the Captain settled, and watched Goose - the alien tentacle cat of doom - as he licked his own asshole.
"Think Carol can deal with this guy, Goose?"
The Flerken gave a muffled meow and continued with his business.
Towards the end of that whole clusterfuck, when Rogers had been near catatonic in the office chair, Nick had turned to Quill and asked how he had gotten into the room without anyone noticing.
Quill had then proceeded to outline the process of making bread in a toilet, while sinking through the floor like it was quicksand.
Nick had just glared at the guy the entire time, not even trying to stop him. He would be reviewing the footage from every camera in the building later, but every attempt to track Quill had been less than fruitless. He didn't expect this time around to turn up anything different.
Despite the confirmation earlier on in their conversation, Nick wasn't entirely sure that he was dealing with Nathan Quill. It was more than possible that some other thing was masquerading as the abductee, and he had no evidence outside of a facial scan, and three reports from Missouri about a spaceship grabbing two kids outside of a hospital.
Nick had no idea what happened to Quill's brother, but presumably, the guy was also a space wizard screwing around somewhere.
Nick flipped through the file on his desk, specifically at three pictures that he lined up on the inside cover of the folder. The first was an older photo from 1987. It was grainy, the colors seemed a little washed, but it was a clear picture of two, young brothers. Smiling proudly after setting up a tent on a campsite - rather poorly, if Nick was honest. The next picture was an artist's rendition of what the kid on the left would have looked like if he was thirty one. If he had grown up like a normal-ass person.
The last was a photo from a security camera from last year. It was the only picture they had been able to get of Quill, and he was smiling directly into the camera. Every other time he was even in the remote vicinity of a security camera, all the footage was reduced to static for as long as he was in the area.
Hill had gotten ahead of him on that one, and had the camera itself confiscated. The techies assured him that there was nothing unique about it. Nothing that they could narrow down and say for certain that Quill couldn't mess with this one in particular.
So the conclusion was that he let them get this picture of him.
However much that pissed him off, the thing that had him crushing four separate coffee mugs was the simple fact that it took Shield four fucking months to get an ID on this guy, utterly livid.
To be fair, they had been looking for someone born in the 90's, based on how old he looked. The agent who decided to go back a bit further got a promotion.
It didn't help that they couldn't track the guy for shit. It didn't help that he seemed to be able to track them. And it definitely didn't help Nick's sanity that the one picture they got was of when Quill had been waiting in line behind him at that motherfucking coffee shop.
"Hill." He fingered the intercom button on his office phone.
When she walked into his office fifteen seconds later, he continued. "Tell me we know how he got into that room."
His second didn't bother to look up at him as she frowned down at the tablet in her hands, her finger making minute movements along the bottom as she scrolled through a video. "Not sure what to tell you, sir." She flipped the tablet around to show him. "One second he wasn't there, and the next he was."
Nick could feel his blood pressure rising. "Any leaks? Texts? A letter to grandma about finding Rogers in the ice?"
She shook her head at him. "Nothing so far. Still combing through it all, but…" She paused.
"What?" He growled.
"I'm the only one looking, right?" She immediately asked, a worried frown on her face.
That caught his attention. Hill was probably the most professional agent in all of Shield. Any expression at all was cause for concern. He had seen her appear worried only a few times, and each time was followed by an utter shit show.
Nick thought back, leaning back in his chair, and glanced back at Goose - who had finished licking his asshole, and settled in for a nap. "Three people were in the room when I told you to start."
Hill nodded. "I checked them first." She was a fucking gem. "Reached out to Stark. Got his AI monitoring our outgoing right now." Okay, maybe not.
Nick's first instinct was to punch her in the face for that, but that only materialized in a hardened glare. "Explain."
Her only response was to hold up a finger at him as she glanced around the room, and walked up to his desk. A quick look at her tablet, then a hard look at his… desk lamp? She reached out and unscrewed the bulb, quiet as a mouse.
Nick watched her carefully, knowing where this was going, and felt his hand clench so hard that the resulting fist turned his black-ass knuckles caucasian.
A minute of disassembly later, Hill pulled out a singular, well hidden circuit board, and carefully removed a sticker of connected copper that served as the antenna.
She held it up to him, and put the bug on his desk. "Jarvis has it on a loop, for the moment. Already traced the source."
He was wondering why she had started the conversation as she did. As soon as she started talking about her investigation, everything she was saying could have gotten any listeners to bolt.
Nick nodded at her, and slammed the corner of his mug onto the bug, smashing it apart completely.
"Who?" He asked. Utterly livid, and actually showing it in his expression.
Hill turned her tablet back to him in answer. On it was a photo of one of his top agents slipping a folded note to another agent. Hill zoomed in after a moment, to the corner of the note, exposed only by chance.
A small stamp was in the corner. He could only see half of it, but it was clear enough. It was a circle with a skull in the center, surrounded by six, curling tentacles.
A/N
Go to my pay tre on if your eyes want more. There's an early chapter of this up on there, as well as my original story. Picturesque fantasy world, magical powers, romance, sassy narrator. Blah blah blah, self promotion, blah blah blah, you get it. Help me pay my bills so I can spend time putting words in your face. Or don't. I'm not your dad - just your annoying cousin who keeps asking for cash.
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