Captain America and Bucky Barnes Imagines

98. STEVE: Knight in Leather Armor

           

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Car horns blare and engines sputter everywhere. It's a foggy Thursday night down 21st in New York City. The streets are packed with metal beasts like sardines—people leaning out of windows and laying on their horns impatiently. This very street is one that presently contains the famous Captain America. Fitted on his motorbike in a shiny grey helmet he waits atop the purring beast for the line of traffic to die down. Tonight he looks much more like Steve Rogers than his superhero alter-ego. He's impatient to get home of course, but he looks through the traffic and deems a weaving path too dangerous to find. So he resorts to leaning back in his seat and surveying the scene lazily. The sidewalks are filled with ambling pedestrians who have shopping bags slung over their shoulders and clacking shoes on their feet. The fog hides their faces but somehow they all manage to look the same. Lights of all-night smoke shops and walk-in barbers light up the way. A few trinket stores sit on either side of a deli that's right across from a sushi bar with bright green blinking neon lights that nearly blind anyone who dares to sneak a peek.

It takes only a few minutes longer for the congestion to begin to clear. Steve can see traffic slowly starting back up, almost making him smile. But then he notices that there's a greenish-grey Nissan clogging up the lane of slow-moving cars just a few vehicles ahead of him. Its left taillight is out and there's a big dent running down the side. Everyone around the car idle impatiently as it stays in one place in the same lane as Steve. It's about five cars down.

The passenger door to the Nissan suddenly opens, causing a lot of other drivers to lay on their horns. Out of the warmth and safety of the vehicle stumbles a woman wearing a long floral skirt and a thin sweater wrapped around her shoulders for warmth. She trips out onto the road, looking flush in the face and angry, before slamming the car door shut and hobbling around the front of it to make her escape. A sort of scream comes from her mouth when the driver of the car, the one she must be arguing with, moves forward in a jaunted fashion as if meaning to run her down. She then moves from the scream to cursing: slamming both of her flattened palms down onto the hood until the driver lays on his horn and she pushes away. She barely has time to make it onto the sidewalk before the Nissan speeds off—leaving her alone in the dust and fog.

  Steve's quick to notice that this woman's anger is melting away into something much softer and more melancholy. He also notices that she's without any sort of purse or bag, which is a fact the woman also becomes aware of as she looks down at her hands and grunts, "Fuck!" under her breath.

The traffic now lines up impatiently behind Steve's stalled motorcycle. He looks back at the crowd, trying to wave in apology, before starting to ride again. He tries to pass the woman... thinking that maybe he should just leave her be... but he gets no farther than a yard away from where she now sulks in the first drops of rain before veering off of the street. He parks his motorcycle haphazardly along the curb and yanks his helmet from his head the moment he can.

Keeping his helmet tucked under his arm, Steve kicks out the kickstand to his bike and moves out of the straddle of the metal beast. On long legs he moves slowly down the street to where the woman now stands under the awning of a comic book store. Steve tries his hardest not to seem intimidating as he approaches. He can't even begin to fathom how scary it'd be to be out alone, unprotected, as a woman in this terrible city at night. Who the hell was it that let her walk out of that car all by herself? Alone! In the cold! With nothing but the clothes on her back and the uncomfortable heels on her feet! Steve doesn't know this woman, but he feels like he wants to have a long conversation with the jackass who abandoned her here: for whatever reason it was, it wasn't a reason good enough.

"Excuse me? Miss?" Steve stops a good eight or nine feet away before speaking to the woman. He'd be farther if the noises of the traffic didn't prevent him.