For Asgard!

The world had changed its shape while Steve had slept, made into that brave new world he had woken to. He remembered the stories told in snippets during the war of people with abilities beyond that of human capabilities, had caught glimpses of the same himself and sworn never to reveal those such strengths or speeds belonged to. And still he had never anticipated the men and women he met in the future he’d been thrown into, the capabilities of technology familiar enough but turned to alloyed suits and flying ships of daunting size, the ferocity of alien monsters come to call in New York, the powers of those who called themselves the gods of Asgard.

Where he had been before too daunted by it all to even know where to begin understanding these radical turnovers in his world, Steve had learned to find the familiar in the strange. The improvements in the gaping absences before. More than the rudeness of people and the high hemlines of the skirts he saw on the streets, there were vaccines that wiped out diseases that had devastated so many he had known, camaraderie among the strange individuals who had collected themselves as the Avengers before going their separate ways.

The strangeness of speaking to a woman from an alien world took an easy back seat to the brightness of her smile and the understanding that threaded through each word that they met there as equals. That no matter the worlds they might have come from or the capabilities of their peoples, they found a common ground in weaponry and of building battle strategy around the capabilities of arm and shield in equal measure. Truthfully, as he tipped his head at her compliment, shoulders easy and loose where he stood, it had become stranger to be seen as being more than a soldier who followed orders and thought no further than that. That someone understood that the use of his shield was not a lazy or violence-abhorrent style, and that neither was it as simple as flinging it as he would a frisbee and it returning out of some inherent magical or technological property, caught him entirely off guard.

“That’s…it exactly, actually.” His brows were somewhere around his hairline, though not in having underestimated her. Never that. He smiled again at her suddenly, watching her intently for a moment before he remembered their surroundings and asked, “Would you like me to show you how to use the bags, or take a run or something?”