Being that I was, well, me, and apparently sleeping for seventy years in a block of ice built up a mighty mean appetite, Steve and I had already worked our way through three pies before either of us felt much like talking.
"So-mmp- There I am sitting at the burger king and Fury rolls up in his personal helicopter, just sets it right there on the parking lot like he owns the place. He wants to know what I'm doing flying over people's heads, scaring the cattle and whatnot. So I tell him my planet got blown up, I'm out of a job, and I could use some direction. One thing leads to another and here I am."
Steve gave me a look of genuine concern that I wasn't expecting. "I'm sorry." he said, making me refrain from my next bite for a few moments.
"What for?"
"You lost your whole planet. I'm sorry to hear that."
Now he was just making me uncomfortable. "Don't be. Fuckers deserved it to be honest." I said, taking that bite and chewing thoughtfully. "Well... Maybe not all of them. But trust me. The universe is a better place without planet Vegeta in it. The Saiyan species didn't exactly do a whole lot of public service."
"Even so, not having a home to go back to..."
"...Yeah, I guess you'd know." I said, feeling a genuine pang of homesickness for the first time in a while. Maybe my home planet didn't get blown up, but that didn't make it any easier for me to get back to it. I finished my slice and gulped heavily, standing up from the table. "Come on. Fury's already gonna be pissed at me as it is. It was a pretty shitty thing they did, trying to trick you with that whole setup with the nurse, but I still think you should talk to him."
He looked thoughtful, and nodded slowly. "You really think he's on the side of the angels here?"
"If I didn't, I wouldn't be working for him. And if he's not... well. My severance package is pretty steep." I said with a savage grin.
----------
Fury did give me a serious hiding after Steve was out of the room, when we went back to report together. But by now I'd gotten over my previous life's anxieties about emotional abuse from authority figures, so in the end I just let him say his piece and then turned and left. That probably just made him even angrier, but oh well.
I met up with Steve again not long after; at a boxing gym of all things. He was doing some seriously undeserved violence to a heavy bag. I just stood by and let him handle it; launching the bag an impressive distance off it's hook and looking pretty frustrated at the result when he was finished.
"Might want to have some spares lined up if you're gonna do that often. If you want something a little sturdier, I can recommend a guy." I said, tossing him a pair of gloves, which he snatched out of the air like they were moving in slow motion.
"Charud." He said, taking only a few heavy breaths before he looked like he was back to 100%. I'd have been jealous if I didn't have this splendid new body the universe had granted me.
"Captain." I said, tossing him a jaunty salute as I pulled my own gloves on. "I'm guessing you were really hoping to get to destroy something today."
He looked chagrinned and glanced back at the bag, flexing his hands before putting the gloves on. "Maybe a little. How do you deal with it?"
"With what?" I said, hovering myself into the ring while Steve joined me, climbing his way in the old fashioned way.
"All... this. With being in a world you don't recognize."
"Well... there's a few things that are the same. Always gonna be guys who need to be thumped, and guys to do the thumping." I shrugged. "Heard you did your share of that already, way back when. You think you're gonna come back to it?"
"I'm not sure that I know how to do anything else." He said, squaring up. I tapped his gloves, a little harder than necessary, sending a bit of a message.
"Better than me. I didn't even know how to do this much." I said, darting a hand out in a jab. With the suit dialed back to fifty percent, he managed to slip it and even threw out a damn good cross; not that it did much. "But you're worried about doing it for the right people."
"That obvious?" He said, testing out a few strikes of his own, that I batted to one side with my wrist, seeing him sharpen his eyes and step it up a bit more when it became clear that he wasn't going to really hurt me.
"Nah. I'm not great at reading people; I just read up on you. Everything says you're a real patriot; not some flag waving sycophant, despite the propaganda work early in the war. Everybody who met you back then said you were principled, upstanding, believed in a real cause. And you'd be right to worry that the flag might be the same, but the people waving it aren't on the level."
"But you work for SHIELD." He challenged, throwing out an impressive combo that came within hairs of clipping my restrained jaw.
"Nnnh; I'm not as principled as you. But Fury hasn't tried to screw me yet, so he's better than some bosses I've had in the past."
"What was it like out there in space?" he asked, hitting me with a body blow and wincing as I instinctively tensed my muscles into a brick wall. Rather than stopping though he crossed me up again and hit me with another; if I was human I'd be nursing broken ribs; as it was, he actually skidded me back a few feet, with a sound like hitting a table with a hammer.
"Boring. Mostly. Sure, I got to visit new and interesting worlds, but hardly any more than visiting. And then if it was nice..." I said, feeling a bit strange to feign guilt over a fictional occupation... but then again, it kind of bothered me that if I really had been Charud, I probably would have jumped at the chance to do his job. At least at first. "The lucky ones, just got a new flag to wave." I shrugged. "That make you think less of me?"
"...I'm not sure. I guess it depends on what you're going to do in the future." He said, before I darted in and hit him with a simple one-two that left him reeling.
"Eyes on the prize captain. The future is what comes after you win."
--------------
Stark clearly put more pride into his work than I'd even guessed; he'd made out like he just threw the training suit together on a whim, but it was easily resizeable, and accounted for different users. After our little spar, Steve seemed to light up again after he'd recovered from the bruises; having a challenge to overcome that he knew how to work toward clearly did wonders for his mood; and when he asked to try the suit on, I obliged him a try, only for it to resize and immediately recognize a new user.
Right now he was going through a normal calisthenic routine, excruciatingly slowly, but much better than I'd managed when I first tried it on; the slight whine of the resistive motors accompanied by heavy drips of sweat pouring down his body. A few weeks had gone by, in which time we'd worked out, sparred, and traded war stories for some measure of modern pop culture. Both of us benefitted from some DVDs I'd taken out of the library with some history documentaries on them; the alternate timeline of this world was similar in some ways to what I remembered, and different in others. There was still the civil rights movement, still vietnam, but no Reagen, thank god. But still there was desert storm, and 9/11, and the War on Terror. At least until Stark had shown up and put the whole thing on pause, forever, if we were lucky.
When we'd watched one on the space race, Steve had actually teared up twice. First at a speech by Howard Stark; when he mentioned how he knew the guy in person, and second at the "One Small Step" line. As vicarious experiences go, it beat anything on youtube. Old Howie apparently kept us on the moon a lot longer than we stayed in my timeline; they'd even set up a research base where astronauts had stayed for nearly six months before the place was abandoned. I wondered how Steve would react to meeting the old guy's son.
We got our chance sooner than I figured. I'd woken up that day with a weird sense of vertigo and a killer headache. Fury called me, on the number that somehow bypassed my call screening and for once he didn't sound pissed off.
"Pack up, you're going to work." he said grimly.
"Something happen?" I said groggily, staggering up and plotting the murder of anything that barred my way to the nearest source of coffee.
"You'll be briefed on the helicarrier."
I'd just about gotten the caraffe off the burner when the vocabulary caught me. "...On the fucking -what- now?"
-------------
Spies in this universe got the coolest toys. To be honest I have no idea why you would even WANT a Helicarrier; if you want to fly somewhere an airplane would be faster, and you didn't add that much range by floating your airbase around. But god damn it was cool. Even though right at this moment it wasn't flying yet.
"You sure you people haven't gotten to another planet yet?" I asked a small, unassuming looking guy who looked almost as bewildered as I did.
He did a double take at my slowly swaying tail and then looked up with a measured look on his face. "Not as far as I know."
"First day? Trust me, it gets weirder." I grinned, offering him a hand. "I'm Charud."
"Bruce..." he said, shaking carefully. "Banner."
I had to fight not to double take. "The Broly?" I said, incredulous.
"The what?"
"Nevermind. I'll explain it some day." I said lamely, scratching the back of my head where my hair had grown in a bit more; apparently the final shape wasn't quite what I had come in with. "I think I'll be seeing you around. I've gotta go get barked at by Fury, you do your thing with the other nerds." I said, floating off the ground and short hopping over to the entrance, just because I could.
I found Fury pretty quickly, up on the huge, open CIC they had perched on top of this thing; just as it was starting to stir beneath my feet and lift off from the water.
"So, this is what they're spending my tax dollars on?"
"And what makes you think you pay taxes?"
"Well you pay me. And I assume you pay taxes. And thus pay me less than you could if you didn't. Ergo, I pay taxes." I shrugged.
Fury gave me what I was starting to interpret as a smile. That is, a glare that was somewhat less irritated than usual. He walked past me, greeting the others who had begun to file in. "Gentlemen."
For some reason Steve gave him a ten as he walked past.
"What's the status on the Tesseract?" Banner asked after a short exchange.
"The what now?" I asked over the table.
"...You didn't read the briefing did you?" Fury sighed.
"Nah. Should have made it more... brief. Sounds like you mean a little more than just a three dimensional representation of a four dimensional cube."
Fury rubbed his brows. "Yeah, a little more. We're monitoring every channel we can find for keywords about it."
"That's... not going to get you too far. How many mass spectrometers do you have?" Banner asked. I tuned them out for the moment; they knew what they were doing better than I did.
I didn't have to wait long. I was just giggling to myself listening to Coulson make an absolute fool of himself around his man crush when one of the monitors beeped angrily and the techie manning it blathered about facial recognition matches.
"Captain. Charud. You're up." Fury said. I flashed Steve a grin, and we went on our way to get suited up and on our way to Germany.
