more on the Mundane Road Trip That Escalates catws au:
- Sam is a year out of paratrooping, which sadly did not involve flying or wings. He’s got a lot on is plate adjusting to civilian life and grieving the loss of his best buddy Riley. He’s knocking around in Gen Eds trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life, while missing and wanting to take care of his family in Louisiana while also glad to be out of their overbearing concerned reach
- Steve grew up as a skinny disabled kid in Brooklyn with a working class single mom, who’s childcare situation consisted mostly of leaving Steve with an octogenarian WW2 veteran. As a result, Steve grew some very Particular habits such as only being versed in pop culture circa 1940. This leads to a very specific impression when Sam meets this white boy with a starched collar and says “By golly” and has a very rigid ideas of politeness right up until someone says something bigoted, at which points he starts serving knuckles sandwiches and getting blood spatter on his very white cuffs.
- Nat is a campus cryptid. She has the poker face of a professional cardsharp and a subtle dry sense of humor. But the more Sam gets to know her as he’s brought in to the fold of Steve’s little group, the more he gets the impression that there’s a lot to Natasha that they Do Not Talk About. Like how she always carries at least one knife hidden on her person, or how she reacts around large men, or how she seems to have stepped out of Russia like Athena, sprung fully formed from her own construction and Zeus’s brain, with a dance scholarship in her fist with no mention of having any parents or what her living situation is.
- Sam is undeclared but considering a major in psych. Steve is a leftist socialist anarchist doing a frankly insane course load double majoring in political and computer science because he wants to fight all the battles and there needs to be more tech literacy to galvanize policy makers and also to maintain op sec, especially when it seems Tony Stank is going to personally deliver the death knell to privacy any day now. Natasha is in her fifth year as a dance major, but has taken some weird and varied courses in her time leading to an unending number of tricks up her sleeve from glass blowing to hotwiring.
- The Winter Soldier was once James Buchanan Barnes, friend to the one and only Captain America, Isaiah Bradley. But it’s been a long time since Hydra started playing with his brain and began the chain of events leading him cratering, battered and injured, into the roof of Sam Wilson’s car and needing all the help he can have to get away from Hydra and reveal and dismantle their evil schemes once and for all.
