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Secret Bit of Right From Wrong	By : ChrisCross Category: Marvel Verse Movies > Avengers, The Views: 9417 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Captain America or The Avengers. I make no money, and live on reveiws alone

Chapter List
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*A.N. Just setting up the scene here. Not much plot, but a few details that will be important later, so bear with me in the mostly dull parts. There is also a touch of angst, but it is plot motivated, and I promise the story will perk up in the next chapter. Remember to feed the Muse, he only eats feedback, and we can't have poor starving muses, now can we?*
The white mini-van that took him to his new living space was registered to the prickly Agent’s cover identity, so they took quite a few switchbacks and evasive maneuvers, so that it would be hard to track where she had picked him up from. Steve was still quite tired from the sudden removal of his heightened stamina. He used to need far less sleep or even rest, because of Dr. Erskine. Adjusting back to his weaker self, he had to re-accustom himself to needing eight or more hours of sleep and not being able to over exert himself without backlash. About the time they went past Times Square the third time, he dozed off, and only woke up when they came to a full stop, and the sound of the engine shutting down jogged him into awareness. They were in an underground garage, occupied by only a few other vehicles, suggesting that the lot was private. An unshakeable Law of the Universe said public parking in this city was always full, and that had been true even in Steve’s day.
Agent McCann came around to his side of the van with the wheelchair they had stored in the back. He noticed right away that her demeanor had changed. She smiled for the first time since they met, and her voice was lighter and more cheerful. “Just let me show you to the elevator, Mr. Grant. I’m sure the loft will suit your needs.” He had no idea what his cover was yet, so Steve decided to stay quiet. As they moved toward the glass elevator at one side of the cavernous underground parking lot, she kept up merry chatter that helped clue him in a bit. “Now, the whole building is linked to this elevator, the garage, obviously, the first floor that holds my gallery, where I hope you might decide to display some of your work, the second floor has my office, and the third is the Loft, where you’ll be staying. You’ll need the key, here. There’s room up there for two occupants, but I don’t have another lodger lined up for a while. You should have the place to yourself. You can get ahold of me during business hours by pressing 1 then # on the phone line, or if there’s an issue that needs handling after hours, the code for my living space is 2#. The receptionist in the gallery is 3#, but until you hold a showing, you won’t need to get in touch with her. Otherwise, the phone works like normal. Here we are.”
They exited the elevator into a small plain room with two doors, one ahead that was labeled in a tasteful gold paint script ‘The Loft’, the other was on the right, and had no label at all. He used the key on the showier door and was confronted by a wide open room, floored in a light hardwood, with minimal furniture. The left hand wall was almost all one long kitchen, separated from the rest of the room only by a proportionately long island with half a dozen chairs at it. On the island was a large manila folder like S.H.I.E.L.D. used, only with no crest, just the name Roger Grant written on it in Fury’s unmistakable bold block print. Agent- no, he would have to get used to her cover- Catherine McCann shifted her tone slightly back to the cool efficiency she had shown in the Avengers HQ.
“The kitchen should be fully stocked with everything you need.” She shot a meaningful glance at the folder. “The bed rooms are back this way. Follow me.” She went to the far end of the room and turned into a hallway that had been obscured from the view by the door simply by virtue of the length of the kitchen. There they made another set of turns that placed them in a hall behind that long bank of cabinetry, which doubled back oddly around closets and a washroom, which she pointed out, in her “Agent” voice. Thankfully Steve had learned his recall before Operation: Rebirth; he could follow the labyrinth of twisting hallway and identical unmarked doors that was the “private” half of the apartment. He figured the awkward layout and narrowness in the halls was to limit the spread of a break-in. This place doubled as a hide-out after all. As they paused a moment by a door, the ceiling light buzzed twice as if there was a short. “Did you see that?” Catherine pointed to the light. “When the lights back here buzz, it means the heat censors in the wall have picked up that many bodies. Two short means two people, a prolonged buzz indicates an additional person entering after the first signal. It won’t pick up a fast target, but to get in any of the rooms they would have to pause long enough for the censors to pick it up. The windows in the front room are darkened from the outside, but they can be used to amplify a parabolic microphone, so don’t say anything classified before you get back here. Also, we do routine sweeps for surveillance equipment, but we can’t get anything too special, or the people we want to keep out would flag this as a safe house. If you think there’s a breach, just call to let me know that you may need pest control. If you have proof, say cockroach for electronic bugs, mice for a watcher you notice outside. I’ll have Fury send in a team to check it out.
You’ll be here under the pretense that you’re thinking of putting work in the gallery, so you may want to spend a little time actually drawing, just so the place feels like an artist’s studio and apartment. Write down a list of the art supplies you need and give it to me, and it’ll be in the bags and boxes we have delivered as part of the “move”. Normal people collect things they consider essential like floors collect dust. They can’t help it, and not having that dust shows a disturbance to the stasis, draws attention. We have a few things that are sort of random to fill out the corners, but you’ll need to let us know what should take center stage. The file on Roger Grant is a canvas; you decide what picture to paint on it. The more your cover matches your life, the less anyone questions it. That folder up front is just a script; just half of what makes a good play, grift, or operation.
This door is the first bedroom, that one farther on is the second, and you need a special key for both bedrooms, it has a computer chip in it, like the ones in car keys. Any attempt to pick the lock, or use a copy of the key will set off alarms all over HQ. Both rooms are the same, so I took the liberty of giving you this one.” She handed him a plain looking brass key with a 1 on one side and the words Do Not Copy on the other. “That’s about it. Do you need any help?”
“Not right at the moment, ma’am. If you give me a moment I’ll write up that list now.” Steve pulled the small sketchpad out of his bag, and wrote quickly. “I will try my best not to be a bother, ma’am. Thank you for putting me up like this.” He handed over the list and she nodded and left without a word or a glance at the paper.
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Later that day, he let in a crew of movers to bring in boxes. He had them leave most of it in the open space between the dining table and the sofa and chairs at the far end of the room. He had decided to set up his studio there. Only the few boxes labeled Bedroom/Bathroom in Fury’s handwriting went any further, and he carried those, not wanting to expose the moving crew to the more interesting security features. He had skimmed the file before they arrived, so he knew a few basics of his cover, enough to bluff his way through the move. Once they left, he unpacked a few boxes. The most important in the main room were his new art supplies, the sketchpads, drawing paper, pencils, paints, bushes, mixing pallets and of course, the easel. Setting up the studio area fully would have to wait for another day, but he had opened the boxes to know what he wanted to put where and what could wait.
Then Steve unpacked the things in the boxes Fury had marked. Most of it was simple essentials, the bedding, for instance. He got out of the wheelchair to make the bed, and had just tossed the comforter out evenly when he spotted a note at the bottom of the box, this one in Ms. Potts neat cursive. “Remember that very few people, and almost no artists, use military hospital corners on the bed sheets. Don’t let anyone see your apartment at your normal, exacting level of cleanliness. – Pepper” It might seem a bit hypocritical for the perfectionistic woman to say, but Steve smiled and tugged out the sides of the top sheet to leave a bit of white showing below the edges of the blue quilted blanket. He knew Pepper only maintained the high standards she did, because it balanced out the chaotic insanity of her playboy boss, and then the super powered world she had to live in because of Tony’s ‘publicly known’ status as Iron Man. She cared deeply about her friends, and she wanted to help the displaced soldier balance out his habitual military orderliness to keep him safe. His bathroom things were in the bag with the clothes, and he laid them out with a certain amount of order, but not the pin straight lines he normally used. The clothes went into the chest of drawers and the closet. The iPod went into a device known as an “iHome”, that he had not owned before. It was in the box containing framed pictures of a few people he didn’t know, and a newly colorized picture of his mother he hadn’t even known still existed in black and white. There were a few flaws in the colors; his mother never wore make-up, and her hair was more of a strawberry blonde than a sandy one, but it did make her look more like a modern woman, not like one who died during the Depression. He supposed that was why they had done that, to bring the timeline of his backstory up to the current times. The pictures of strangers all had those square yellow note sticker things on them naming the people and referencing the page in his cover identity file. After going through the file again, memorizing the information and linking them to the faces, he placed each carefully on the top of the dresser.
The small effort of unpacking wore him out more than it should have, even at his original level of strength. The doctors had warned him that might happen as he recovered, but it was still a disappointment to feel so weak and tired. His exhaustion drove home the uncomfortable point; he wasn’t as strong as the average man. He didn't even have the endurance he had before being a super-soldier. He was back to being small and sickly, less resiliant than he had ever been in his whole life. It wasn't a happy thought.
The apartment was very nice, and the bed was comfortable, but as he lay down for a nap, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had been sleeping in a fox hole as he did in the War. No amount of physical comfort could blunt the sense of loss he felt. Half his identity, the half people liked, was tied to somthing that was gone. He foolishly put himself in front of an unfamiliar machine and it had stripped all the things he had been given from him.
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Secret Bit of Right From Wrong