Man Out of Time - A Captain America / Avengers Fanfiction

Chapter 74

Chapter 74

"Will you quit laying around? You've got work to do!"

The brassy strains of Glenn Miller's 'String of Pearls' strummed in the background. Somebody kept poking at him.

"Peggy?"

Whoever was trying to make him wake up, they were persistent. He opened his eyes and recognized the stamped tin ceiling of the Stork Club. With a groan, he sat up. Was he dead … again?

"Who else would it be?" Peggy gave him a hand up. She was wearing that red dress he liked, although lately he found himself fantasizing more about the pretty blue dress Bernice had worn that night they had first danced together at Pepper Potts birthday party rather than the dress her grandmother had worn.

The band in the background grew louder, the dancing couples swirling around in a dance that was jazzy, but neither too fast nor too slow. The kind of music that was perfect to get to know the gal you were dancing with, something modern night clubs seemed to have forgotten was the whole -point- of going out to dance with their too-loud music.

"We've got to stop meeting like this," Steve said with a grin. He stared down at his World War II dress uniform, the reassuring feel of fine wool and a tailored cut much more natural than that ridiculous stretchy armor they made him wear in 2012. Peggy had her arm held out waiting for him to take her elbow, a universal gesture of a gal dropping a hint she wanted to dance.

"I'm not going with you Valhalla," Steve said. "They need me."

"Then quit dying on me!" Peggy's dark eyes flashed with humor, but also with a sense of urgency. "Don't worry. It's only a dance."

Her hand slipped into his, moving into his dance space as naturally as though they had danced an entire lifetime together. In a way, they had. The dance no longer had that dreamlike quality it had possessed before, all those times he had dreamed of dancing with her, longing for something he had never been meant to have. They were two old friends, dancing together in this place the way two old friends might play a game of golf. He followed her lead as she led them into the thick of the dancing couples.

His mind kept wandering back to Bernice and that ridiculous dance she had tried to teach him that first night she had danced with him, the Badonkadonk. Tonight's band was not a full big band, but a guy on a modern synthesizer made it seem like the band had more members than they really had. There was also a bit of a hip-hop strain to the music now and then, as though any moment a DJ would take over and transform the Stork Club into the modern age. Dancers kept bumping into them, as though the room was far more crowded than it really was.

"Why do we keep meeting like this?"

" You're the one who keeps conjuring it up this way." Peggy shot him a wolfish grin, her lips turning up in a smile that was so much like Bernice's it made his heart ache. "Whatever you want to see when you're drifting between the realms, that is where you go."

"I have to get back," he said. "They took Bernice."

"Don't you worry about Bernice," Peggy said. "An old enemy has seen the error of his ways."

"Who?"

Peggy just gave him an enigmatic smile. Although she was not wearing the armor of a Valkyrie right now, Steve knew what she really was. There appeared to be -rules- about how much information messengers such as Peggy were permitted to tell people who were still alive. She had told him not to worry about his wife because an old enemy was helping her. Whatever that meant, it was both important, and probably the only information he was going to get.