Reality in Motion

road trip

"Where did Captain America learn to steal a car?" Nat asked, bemusedly. And at the same time, breaking the comfortable silence that had been filling the car for the past hour and a half.

After their near run-in with the SHIELD STRIKE team at the mall, Steve hot wired one of the trucks in the parking lot so they could make their escape. The flash drive Fury had gave him before he died had given them reason to believe that their answers would lie in a place he hadn't been to in over seventy years. He wasn't about to give up just because of that.

"Nazi, Germany." he answered her question. There were a couple of times during the war where the Howling Commandos needed a ride. To lessen their chances of being spotted by Hydra soldiers, they usually sole Hydra vehicles so they could operate under the guise of being on the same side until the time was right to strike. Though most times, Hydra realized they were coming - his uniform was a dead giveaway. What he wouldn't give for a stealth uniform back then...

He tilted his chin up toward where her feet were pressed up against the dashboard, "And we're borrowing, get your feet off the dash." he used the tone Q teasingly referred to as his grandpa tone, like he was disciplining her. Nat gave him a slight smirk before dramatically taking her feet off the dashboard.

A disgusted sigh escaped him instinctively when they passed by the sign welcoming them to New Jersey as the sun set. It wasn't even intentional. It had just been bred into him to dislike Jersey. The armpit of America, as Bucky called it. No one liked people from Jersey, no one liked Jersey either - not even the people who lived in Jersey. Which was why they always were in New York, clogging up their streets with their stupid Jersey attitudes. The only thing it was good for was being used as a location of residency for enlistment forms. And maybe Camp Lehigh.

The camp was his beginning, really. The place where he started his journey to being Captain America. But after everything that happened, he never thought he would be going back to the camp. Not in a million years. It was just another painful reminder of what was and what could've been.

Erskine had shipped him off to the camp with the instructions to simply do his best and be himself. Great advice. Steve wasn't sure what he was expecting; he had never step foot into one of the training camps before - only seeing them during the war PSAs. But as soon as he arrived, he knew he didn't belong. All the other men were muscular and in shape, probably passing the enlistment exam on their first try. With his skinny, frail figure and a two sizes too big helmet, Steve stood out like a sore thumb.

The weeks he had spent there, trying to prove that he was fit to be considered to be a part of the Army, were some of the most grueling weeks of his life. The training itself was difficult; he had zero muscle definition to pull himself up the ropes course, his lungs gave out during every exercise, and he missed every target during shooting practice because of his poor sight. Some of the other men didn't make it any easier for him. They'd bully him during the training exercises; making courses collapse on him, shoving past him during their runs so he fell over, or not even considering him as a teammate for drills. He had dealt with bullies all his life, he should've known that there would be a few in Camp Lehigh. He could handle them. And he was there to serve his country, so he powered through the training and ignored the bullies because he wanted to prove he could be a part of something bigger.

He didn't quite understand what the "bigger" was until he was chosen to be a part of it. Phillips had given a speech the first day about the purpose of the SSR - how it was trying to create an army of super soldiers in order to escort Hitler "straight to the gates of hell." Steve thought he was trying to be dramatic, not literally create an army of super soldiers. Clearly, he was wrong.