[ steve has never been very good at feeling useless, at being idle. they've told him it will be a week before he can leave the complex, that they're arranging accommodation and the likes for him. he doesn't trust this place or their assurances, but wandering the complex doesn't yield any suspicious findings.

he's itching for something to do, but in the absence of it, he spends his time sketching — new york both as he remembers it from his childhood and as he's last seen it, aliens, the stump of an arm that fills his chest with heaviness even as he draws it, wanda's outstretched hands, twisting and glowing with magic, anything and everything that comes to his mind. it should be calming, but the downtime just feels forced. ]

Is everything they tell us true?

[ the storm is unexpected and violent and there's nothing steve can do but to hold on. it's odd and worrisome how much of his strength is gone, sapped from him by the ingress portal or something else. while he hasn't always been like this, while he hasn't always been healthy by any stretch of the imagination and still remembers what it had been like to have to fight for breath sometimes, he finds that he's gotten used to it, to the serum's effect on him.

now it's gone. the storm forces him not to focus on that because there are more immediate concerns, like the cold water when a wave crashes over the boat and breaks it in half, like clinging to a fragment of wood. in the grey light and mist, steve can barely make out an island, or what he thinks is one, and someone's hand coming up over the water only to sink below the surface again.

he kicks his feet, moving sluggishly through the water, toward that hand, toward whoever it is that is drowning, both his hands still clinging to the wood fragment. it's his lifeline; hopefully it can become the same for whoever's hand he's reaching right now. ]

[ run into a depowered steve on the dock or in the boat, share body heat with him on the shore, send him a misfired text, i'll roll with anything. ]