Ahahaha yeah, good times, been there, done that. Right, so, I’m picturing this as like a month or two after Avengers, while Steve is still Figuring Out the 2000’s. Also featuring: Steve swearing like a Brooklyn kid who went into the Army, and my weird obsession with time-displaced super soldiers who are angry about bananas. WARNING: 100% WISH FULFILLMENT. Some general assholery and Steve losing his temper a little under the cut because…this is longer than I meant it to be.
Steve was sure it would shock any number of people, but his biggest problems with the 21st century weren’t the televisions, phones, or coffee makers (thank you, Stark). There was a learning curve, but it was reminiscent of the learning curve after he’d gotten the serum—hell, he’d gone from a colorblind, partly deaf asthmatic with more chronic illnesses than you could fit on a chart to a walking talking superhuman. The whole world had been brighter, louder, and faster-paced than Steve had ever been remotely prepared to deal with, so he went onto stages and into battles until he adapted. The 21st century was brighter, louder, and faster-paced than the forties could have dreamed, so Steve got on his bike and went to tour the country without help. By the time he got back, he was pretty sure he could manage technology well enough to Google shit like ‘what is Facebook.’
(Google was good. Steve fucking loved Google. All the answers were on Google. Including answers to questions he never needed answered, but he had gotten better at choosing his search terms.)
No, Steve’s biggest problems with the 21st century, other than the obvious fact that it wasn’t his century, mostly revolved around money.
Example: who in their right goddamn mind paid seven dollars for a pound of apples? Had anyone ever heard of affordable bread? What the fuck was happening with the price of potatoes—potatoes, for the love of God.
“Inflation’s a bitch,” a passing college student said in dry amusement, obviously picking up on his bitter muttering. Steve’s scowl deepened and he put the apples in his cart.
For the first time in his life, Steve actually didn’t have to worry about money—apparently seventy years of back pay totaled up to a significant amount of cash—but that didn’t mean that he didn’t wince as he did the math for his food. If this was usual for one person, what the hell were families paying? Bucky’s family had been Bucky, his ma, his dad, and all three of the girls, plus sometimes Steve. How was a family of seven affording this food? He added it to his mental list of things to Google, along with what is wrong with bananas.
Bananas. Of all the things for the future to fuck up, fucking bananas were weird bland not-bananas now. Steve had never had strong opinions on bananas before, but live and goddamn learn, apparently.
Anyway. The money thing was why, upon entering the grocery store, Steve hadn’t paused at the table set up just inside the door, save to read the sign hanging in front of it—it was good to see that the Girl Scouts had survived. Nonetheless, he could bake cookies his own self and probably get a better net value than six bucks for a tiny box, thanks. To be polite, he’d waved a little to the girls at the table, both wearing green sashes and winning smiles as they did a slow but respectably steady business, and then he’d gone on his damn way like a civilized human being.
But God forbid that other people could do the same. Steve checked out with his apples and cereal and soup ingredients (and no bananas), put them in pair of reusable grocery bags, and started for the door just in time to hear raised voices.
Well. A raised voice. It sounded like a man, older, with a neutrally middle American accent. The table where the Girl Scouts had been selling their cookies was ringed by a small crowd, steadily growing larger by the moment, and Steve had to mutter a string of ‘scuse-me-sorry-ma’am-can-I-just-yeah-thanks under his breath as he shouldered through to see what was happening.
The voice belonged to a guy in his fifties, thickset but not out of shape, with dark hair just going salt-and-pepper. His face was flushed red, twisted into a bitter snarl as he shouted at the two stiff-backed girls behind the table. Steve noted that the girls, both wide-eyed and pale with a sort of primal panic, couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen at the most.
“—nothing but needy bitches looking to take advantage of men! This,” the man snarled, slamming a hand down on the table so hard that it shook, “is a cult, designed to convince our children that ‘feminism’ is good for the country instead of being an excuse for women to work less and get paid more.”
“Can you hold onto this for me?” Steve murmured, turning and offering one of his bags to the young woman to his left, and she nodded absently, taking the bag without letting her phone shake as she recorded the situation.
“Besides,” the man continued, clearly getting into his rant, “the Girl Scouts support homosexual behavior—are you two girlfriends? Are you dykes, or are you waiting to get older so that you can get knocked up by some guy and abort your baby? Maybe you’re just planning to have the kid,” he spat, “and get on welfare so that the rest of us can pay for everything you need.”
“Hey,” Steve said to the guy on his right, “can you take this?” The guy took his other bag, a nauseated look on his face.
“What, are you going to cry?” the man sneered down at the two girls in front of him—one of them did look like she was about to cry, almost shaking as he loomed over her. “I thought you femi-nazi cunts were supposed to be tougher than–”
“That is enough,” Steve said, stepping forward and catching the man’s arm. He had a not-insignificant height advantage—Steve was a clean and even six feet, but the man was perhaps five inches shorter, enough that Steve could loom just as effectively as the man had been doing over the two girls. “You’re done.”
“Let me go, you fucking–”
The man spun, and made a critical mistake. He threw a punch.
Steve caught him by the wrist, twisted, and the man dropped to one knee with a yelp like a rabbit in a trap, his arm angled sharply up behind his back. Steve pressed down a little, the barest fraction of his strength, and got a string of curses in reply.
“Now,” Steve said in his most reasonable voice, feeling the bubbling anger fill his chest and make his head light. “Why don’t you walk away before this gets any messier?”
“Who the fuck are you?” the man panted through clenched teeth.
“My name’s Steve,” Steve said. His heart was beating with the bone-rattling speed he remembered from when he was a kid, getting into fights on the streets of Brooklyn—now, he took care not to let it make his hands shake. If he lost focus and closed his fist any harder, he might break the man’s wrist. If he broke any bones, Steve intended to do so on purpose. “I don’t like bullies. So. How about you just get the hell out of here, now, before I have one of these nice folks call the police?”
“Oh, um, I did that,” a voice said, and a woman about two ranks back in the crowd shakily held her phone up as proof. A little girl clung to one of her hands. “Sorry, I just–”
“No, that’s great, ma’am,” Steve interrupted with a smile. “That was real smart of you.”
“You cocksucking freak,” the man snarled up over his shoulder, and Steve pressed down a bit harder on the arm locked across his back. He could feel the man’s shoulder creaking dangerously, threatening to dislocate as the man made a shrill sound of pain.
“I don’t like that kind of language, either,” Steve said sternly. He looked up at the two girls, who were watching him with something very close to tearful awe. “Are you two kids okay?” he asked, trying to sound as gentle as he could manage. One of them nodded slowly, and jabbed her friend with an elbow until the other girl nodded too.
“Um,” the first girl said, “do you mind if I—are you Captain America?”
Steve winced a little, offered her a wry smile. “Steve, please. So, am I just real obvious?”
“Yes,” she said baldly, and Steve chuckled at that, earning a shaky grin from the girls.
“Bullshit,” the man on his knees hissed, and Steve felt the fine thread of his self-control snap. The pop of the dislocating shoulder was quick and loud in the crowd, and Steve dropped the man in disgust.
“You listen to me,” Steve said, struggling to keep his voice even as he gave the man an ungentle prod with his knee, forcing him to look up at Steve standing over him. “I’ve known women in the Army who could hand your ass to you on a plate, and girls in telephone centers and diners who could outtalk, outthink, and outfight half the guys I served with. Lesbians too. And every last one of ‘em was being paid shit for their work and ignored every second of the time they weren’t being hit on by scum-suckin’ trash like you. You want to crucify someone for being pro-abortion, you can pick on someone your own damn size. The Tower ain’t that hard to find, I’m sure you can have a nice talk with the Widow about women’s health.”
“I wasn’t–”
“And as long as we’re on the subject,” Steve continued, raising his voice to drown out the man on the ground. “How goddamn dare you throw around words like ‘Nazi’ about people who just want to be treated like human beings. These two girls are fucking teenagers, what the hell were you thinking? Don’t answer that,” he said mercilessly, crouching down to be on a level. “Because listen real close, pal, but you weren’t in the right seventy years ago and you ain’t in the right now, and I’m still real fucking tired of hearing your bullshit.”
Steve stood up and turned to the young woman who had taken one of his grocery bags, realizing with a burst of rueful amusement that he was facing a wall of phone cameras recording him.
“So, uh, folks,” he said, already mentally drafting the apology letter he would need to write to the PR team Pepper and SHIELD had assigned to the Avengers, “when you inevitably put that online, it would be real great if you could forward it to Fox News so they stop calling me. Can I have my groceries back, please?”