Finding Love in France (Alternate Version)

Part 8: Dinner

They made small talk while she worked on dinner. He was polite and avoiding anything too personal. She, on the other hand, had some very specific questions for him.

"Before you met Abraham Erskine, what were you like?" She wondered. "Were you always so tall?"

Steve laughed. "No, actually I was about your size. Probably weighed about the same, too."

"You are joking?" She was shocked.

"No, I was just a little guy with asthma." He smiled thinking about his old body. "Got sick all the time, couldn't run without passing out, and got rejected by the Army a bunch of times before Erskine got a hold of me."

"When did he finish the project? When I was working with him, we had just pieced together the sensory enhancements..." she was amazed and let it slip.

"So you worked with him on this? Did you work with Stark, too?" He was trying to figure her out.

"Howard Stark?! He got Howard Stark to work with him?! Wow!" She was impressed. "No, Captain, Abraham and I stopped working together when he defected to the States...I was unable to join him for personal reasons." She looked away.

"Oh...Sorry." He wondered if he should tell her what had happened.

"No need to apologize. I was almost finished with medical school and stupidly chose to stay behind. My own fault. I should have listened to Abraham, but my family was still in Berlin..." She wondered how much this American knew about the other parts of the war.

He cleared his throat. "Is that what happened to you and your family?" He motioned towards the markings on her left arm. "Are the rumors true?"

She looked up at him. "Yes." It was all she could spit out without crying. She turned towards the sink.

He got up from the table and put a large hand on her back. "I'm sorry, Doctor. I didn't want to believe it when I first heard the stories..."

She was quietly crying. "Believe them. All of them." She couldn't look at him. "They are more real and more awful than anything you can possibly imagine..." She cried harder. "My family, my friends, entire cities, slaughtered...I should have been one of them..."

Hearing this, he wrapped his arms around her and let her cry for a while. When he got up the courage to ask, he could barely get the words out. "How did you survive?"

She turned around to look at him. That's when he noticed how big and green her eyes were. His arms were still around her and he felt a responsibility to protect this person who had saved his life.

"It's a long story, Captain Rogers..." she said tiredly.