The Wolf and the Soldier

~|Chapter 4: Not Everything is Always as it Seems|~

If you'd like to give a song a listen, I'd recommend 'Midnight' by Beth Crowley :3

~~19 August~~
~~Chicago~~

            Nearly two months go by without incident. Well, almost. Steve was still unused to having a body that could bench-press a truck and easily break bones between his fingers. He broke a lot of stuff on accident from using too much force or grip. Ripping a couple doors off their hinges happened less often – thank God – but still enough for him to hesitate before grasping a doorknob. Dakota was a great help for those moments, a strangely understanding note in her voice as she calmed him down from the panic of breaking something.

          Dakota was only called out once for a shorter recon mission near Russia. Without Steve really knowing how, she'd managed to wiggle herself into his life so far, he was hard pressed to find a reason to get her out. If he even wanted to – which he didn't. She was always there during his shows – just off to the side, and always cheered him up after a rough day.

            He'd learned so much about her, down time between shows providing a lot of time to talk and discover each other. He talked about his home back in Brooklyn, she told stories about her family in Germany. Through lots of questions and back-and-forth asking, she's opened up about her love of knitting (and wasn't that surprising) and even offered to make him something if he wanted after the war was over.

            Of course, there were a few things she refused to talk about or explain. Her random disappearance for a few days being one of them, but he never pressed too much considering the first and only time he did she avoided him for an entire day before apologizing and explaining that she really didn't want to talk about it. More than a few times she'd distanced herself and treated Steve like he was merely an acquaintance. Still polite and friendly, but far too impersonal for the close friendship he thought they were building. It was disheartening, as though she was drawing back for whatever reason. Whenever he asked it was usually deflected. But it wouldn't last. He'd do something stupid or break something and she'd come a little closer again.

          Another such thing was her strict avoidance of Senator Brandt...

            But he soon found out why, exactly, that was...

"Will you drop it already? I've told you no countless times!"

Steve pauses in his search backstage at the extremely angry voice of the very person he was looking for. His feet move hastily to the source and he peeks into a room near the back entrance. Dakota's there alright. Glaring at Brandt with the cold fury of a thousand molten glaciers in her eyes.

"Think about it, the women of America need someone to look up to," Brandt is quick to try and interject, each word only making the repressed twitches of her hands more and more frequent. "You could be that woman!"

"I should already be that woman!" She snaps back, taking an imposing step forward to prompt a rapid one back. "I risk my life for the Allied forces, I infiltrate bases alone with no backup or hope of extraction, and you're telling me that to give women a role model to look up to I have to drop everything I've worked for and become a- a showgirl?!" With each new point, she advances and Brandt retreats faster than a squirrel after a dog's bark. Her eyes blaze, lips twitch up. She almost seems to tower over the Senator. "You've already roped Stevan in with your false promises of granting him leadership over his own group someday, du fige Schlange!"

He tries to open his mouth and gain some semblance of ground, but she interrupts him with a vicious snarl tearing from her throat. Lips lifted and mouth open in a purely animalistic display.