Inferno: Remember Me

Moments

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE MOMENT YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR ( hopefully ) 

You checked your Hamilton watch, which had belonged to Peggy, and saw that the time was now 4:00 a.m. You had been awake the whole night. Today was the day that the recruits arrived. Hopefully, you would find the man whose name had intrigued you out of the blue. 

Angie had left your tent, and Howard was at your desk, messing with your heater. 

"Stark." you said. 

He answered with, "Hmmm?" without looking up at you. He was messing with the cast-iron top lid on the heater, and pulling the extension cord. You knew he was touch-starved of technology. 

"Stark." you said louder. He looked up.

Finally. 

"Yeah?"

"What are you doing?" you asked him. You groaned internally as you realized that he probably wouldn't sleep for another week. Instead, he would be bothering you for a very long time. You had to convince Colonel Philips somehow to bring Howard to the lab immediately. 

"You know what this is, Carter?" he inquired. He leaned over the heater and inspected the spark plug. He frowned and shook his head. 

"... A heater."

"Yes, Carter, but what type of heater?"

You rolled your eyes. "I don't memorize the manufacturing details of every machine I find. I'm not as committed to technology as you are." 

"Helen, Helen, Helen, you silly goose. This is a M-1937 space heater. It's a masterpiece of mechanical engineering. It can produce up to Fifty thousand  BTU per hour, and has an area of up to Five hundred square feet." As he stroked the heater, he sounded exasperated, like he expected you to know all this. "I expected you to know all this." There we go. Howard Stark, at his finest.

"Howard. I don't care."

He glared at you and crossed his arms. "Tell me, buddy, when was the last time you cleaned this thing?" he asked you in a low voice. He seized a rag and wiped the dirt off the plug. "This heater is a fire hazard, you know. You're lucky it hasn't exploded yet.  And guess what? Your barometric damper is broken, and the whole thing is overheating." He rubbed the handle lovingly. "Besides, we've already got some hot items in here." He glanced at you and smiled coyly.

Your eyes widened in horror as you realized the old Howard Stark was back to his brash shenanigans. "Howard, I will slap that smirk off your face. Shut it."

You were seriously resisting the urge to yell in his face, "At least I wasn't the one who passed out drunk on my friend's bed, you pathetic womanizer", but you knew that that was going TOO far. So, the chances this was coming out of your mouth were devastatingly low.

He sniggered as he got up from the chair, picked up his jacket, and gave you a quick kiss on the forehead. Howard was getting too personal with you.

"See you in the meeting with Brandt. I think. " he added, confused, lifting the tent curtain to step outside. Without warning, he froze in his tracks. "Ah, geez. That's a whole lot of soldiers." 

You followed him outside the tent, curious. How many could there really be? Not more than one thousand for sure.  After all, it was only a regiment. 

You were wrong.

You were quite experienced in estimating the number of people in groups, and you knew immediately that the amount of soldiers, who were new dismounting the convoy of trucks provided to transport them around the field, was almost twice as much as a thousand soldiers. Although you had seen quite a lot of infantry regiments, this was most probably the biggest one you had seen.