maelace asked: Okay, for Steve Rogers prompts: Steve is leaving the grocery store and hears some guy yelling at the little Girl Scouts selling cookies about how Feminism Is Ruining This Country and Girl Scouts Are Evil for Supporting Abortion and Lesbians. (Because this actually happens, it happened to me when I was a kid. And once you are like 13 you are allowed to sell without an adult, so me and my friend were alone).
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.
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