He'd once bet a guy ten bucks that nothing else could surprise him, but the world kept throwing curve balls at him.

At that particular moment in time, it was Hermione who was surprising Steve. Any other civilian would have started to panic by now; after all, the air had been draining from the room for about two minutes. For all he knew, both he and Hermione had been headed to their deaths. While he was at peace with the idea of joining his friends and family, he was sure as hell not going to take an unarmed civilian with him.

While he pounded on the reinforced door, Hermione had sat still. Steve had guessed that she was in shock, but she looked cool as a cucumber. Perhaps she thought he had a trick under his sleeve to get them out. He was supposed to be Captain America after all, the world's first super hero. He wasn't supposed to be so... useless.

"Did you hear that?" Hermione asked, as casually as if she were discussing the weather. "That click?" Steve had missed it. However, as he strained his ears he noticed one difference in the sounds of the room; the faint sucking noise from the vents had disappeared.

"They system's failed." He told her excitedly.

"Meaning the air is no longer being drained out and we will no longer suffocate to death." Hermione summarised efficiently with a short, sharp, shrug of her shoulders. "Stroke of luck."

Something in her tone made him pause. It was almost as if she'd been expecting this to happen. Could she have abilities of her own that would make her accurately predict the future or control the air conditioning somehow. Narrowing his eyes, Steve stared at her for a little longer than was polite. When she looked back, he found himself blushing and diverted his gaze. He was being ludicrous. If there were other enhanced people out there, Stark would know about it, and they would have been informed.

"Perhaps we could use this situation to our advantage Captain?" Hermione said. "We could discuss the financial plan my associate and I drew up for the Avengers?" The suggestion was innocent enough, but something in her voice made him pause.

He'd almost forgotten the strange excuse Pepper had given for them arriving at the compound. Now he was thinking about it, it was weird. This whole situation was weird. Why wouldn't Stark have told them about financial troubles? The way Pepper had explained it to him earlier, Stark didn't even realise he was burning up his assets. His mind stretched back to a conversation Natasha and Stark had had a while back when she was asking for a raise.

"I don't even know how much I'm paying you now!" Tony had argued.

"Which mean's you can afford it." Natasha had said, quick witted as ever.

"Captain? Steve?" Caught up in his own thoughts, Steve took a few seconds longer to answer than he should have done. Long enough to make him look a little bit foolish.
"Sorry." He said suddenly. "If it's all the same to you, I'd like to get to know the person I'm doing business with a bit better before investing in their services." He replied, trying to sound as suave as Bucky used to when talking to a beautiful dame. If it was working, Hermione showed no sign that he was charming her. Instead she nodded briskly, opening her hands ever so slightly as if to imply she was an open book. "Well, since we've got time, how about you tell me the story of that guy you socked."

"Oh." Even in the darkness, Steve's super soldier senses picked up the faint blush on her cheeks, along with her slightly elevated heart rate. "I'm afraid it's not a particularly riveting story." She admitted, Steve waited patiently. After a few seconds, Hermione sighed and carried on talking. "When I was fourteen I attended a boarding school for... gifted individuals. The same school Pepper attended actually; I was very close with her older brother."

"Pepper has a brother?" Steve was surprised at this revelation. Pepper had never mentioned to him that she'd studied at an English boarding school, nor that she had any siblings. Something churned in his stomach as he though of all the times he'd opened up to her about Bucky and his parents, and she'd never even deigned to mention anything about her past. He wondered if Tony knew.

"Yes." Hermione rolled her eyes. "Are you going to let me tell the story or are you going to keep interrupting?"

"Sorry ma'am." He couldn't help but smile at her authoritative tone. "Please continue."

"Well, my friends and I knew the game keeper... in this climate saying this sounds shadier than it actually was, but I promise nothing there was untoward about it. We used to visit him at break times and weekends for his home made cakes and stupendous cups of tea. In our third year, his hippo... I mean his dog..." She winced as she paused for breath (when she was talking a story, Steve had noticed she rarely stopped for breath). Steve frowned. He knew what it was to accidentally say the wrong name in a conversation, but he had never heard anyone get confused between a hippo and a dog. "His dog bit a fellow student called Malfoy, the dog barely scratched him but the Malfoy's father was furious. He milked it for all it was worth and his father threatened to sew the school if poor Buckbeak wasn't put down. We had just come back from saying our farewells to the poor pooch when we saw Malfoy. He and his friends were laughing about the dog's imminent death, so I punched him in right in the jaw."

It was clear that Steve got the impression there were a few things she was leaving out of the story, but he couldn't quite grasp the scale of Hermione's deception. Of course, it was not Hagrid's dog that had been sentenced to death, it had been the hippogriff known as Buckbeak... However, a dog was as close to the truth as Hermione dared to tell him.

"I can tell from you're voice you're proud of yourself." He grinned.

"I mean it's nothing compared to your achievements." She backtracked. "How many times have you punched Adolf Hitler in the jaw?"

"Ooh, more times than I can count." Steve laughed. When he thought back, he struggled to remember the last time he had actually laughed. In the Smithsonian, there was a video of him and Bucky laughing about something trivial. Despite being in the centre of a war zone, they had looked so carefree that Steve had yearned to go back to that time. That desire faded every so often, mostly when he was training or fighting. "But my best story is probably Red Skull."

Suddenly, the whole atmosphere in the room seemed to change. Hermione stood a little taller, her ears seeming to prick up at the mention of the man. Despite the darkness, he could see her eyes staring intensely at him, eager for more details. Was she just interested in his story? Or was this something more?

"Red skull?" Hermione asked. Her voice sounded strange, slightly higher pitched than it usually was. Come on Hermione! She thought angrily to herself in a voice that sounded surprisingly similar to Ron's. Try to sound like a normal mildly curious person! But she couldn't because those two words had swum up an image in her head that she was desperate to know more about. Red Skull. Unlike the depictions of death she had seen while studying ancient scrolls, the being she'd seen in Harry's memory had had a hideous scarlet head, stripped of all flesh. A Red Skull. "Who's that?"

"The founder of Hydra. Also known as Johann Schmidt." Steve said, sounding slightly suspicious. Hermione cursed the fact she hadn't been more discrete. He was on edge now. Funny how fragile these superheroes seemed to be; they picked up on even the slightest change in the atmosphere of a room and instantly saw it as a threat.

"And Hydra was the scientific division of the Nazis." Hermione said, nodding to herself. "My grandfather grew up during the war, he was too young to fight but whenever I visited him I used to sit and read his books on the war so I know a little... enough to know that the Nazis took Jewish scientists out of concentration camps to work for them. They didn't stop to think about the morals of their actions, they only thought about their desire for a descent nights sleep, clean clothes, proper meals and fresh water."

"Yep." Steve nodded. "One of those people was a gentleman called Dr Abraham Erskine. Also known as the man who invented the super serum that made me who I am today. Without him... well... I like to think I still would have done everything I could for the war... I just woulda done it slower." He laughed at his own joke before staring down at his own hands. "You see, the serum exaggerates your traits; goodness becomes greatness; bad becomes worse. That's how Erksine explained it to me years ago when I had no idea what I was signing up for."

"So you took the serum and became great." Hermione nodded. Her words made Steve's face flush bright red; he opened her mouth to correct her, to say he was just a normal guy from Brooklyn, but she didn't give him the chance to interrupt. "And Schmidt took it and became..."

"He became a monster." Steve whispered. "While Hitler coveted a greater Germanic empire of Aryans, Schmidt set his eyes on the whole world. With the power of the tesseract - also known as the space stone - he found a way to achieve his goal. A handful of men, the Howling Commandos and I, travelled across Europe tearing down the Hydra bases and destroying Schmidt's plans. When we attacked the last base we were... erm... we were a man short. I ended up fighting Schmidt on a plane headed for the states so I fought him and... well I don't really understand what happened. He grabbed hold of the stone to increase his own power and, in doing so, just disappeared."

"What do you mean disappeared?" Hermione asked, a deep frown of her face. Could he have disapparated? No! If he had magic the muggles would have never succeeded in destroying the Hydra bases. "That was right before you went into the ice right? Do you think that distorted your memories?"

"Dunno..." Steve frowned, scratching the back of his neck awkwardly as he tried to recall memories from over ninety years before. "No. No, I remember it clear as day. He just disappeared into thin air then I heard... I heard Agent Carter's voice over the radio asking for my coordinates. There were no traces of him when they woke me up either. It's strange."

The instant he mentioned Agent Carter he somehow looked so much younger. So much smaller. If he'd stayed a little guy perhaps Agent Carter would have fallen in love with his heart and soul and they would have lived out their days with him as an artist and stay-at-home father and her as a high flying secret agent. They could have been happy. Hermione could see in Steve's bright blue eyes that he yearned to get back to that time and live that life. It was impossible without a time turner that took you back years as opposed to hours, and all of them had been destroyed before Voldemort had infiltrated the ministry for magic all those years ago.

"She's the only woman... one of the few people who ever actually saw me for me, disregarding what I look like or what I'd done." He smiled sadly, folding his arms and hanging his head sadly. "And now there are some days where she doesn't even know me."

"I understand." Hermione whispered. Steve scoffed; far too many people said attempted to empathise with him when they had no idea what he could possibly be going through. "I do. My parents don't remember who I am." Hermione whispered. "They went through trauma when I was seventeen that damaged their memory... I've been trying to cultivate a relationship with them for years but there's so much they don't remember. It's like they're living in a different world, getting on with their lives while I'm chasing what I had when I was younger."

"Wow." Steve murmured gently, wiping a tear from Hermione's cheek with surprisingly soft fingers. With the amount of workouts, fighting and painting he'd done, she'd expected his skin to be rough and calloused. It was a long time since she'd allowed herself to be this vulnerable. She was the minster for magic. She couldn't show even an ounce of weakness without the opposition using it against her. "You really do get it."

Before Hermione could make up an answer, there was a loud crashing noise. With a small scream, Hermione leapt forward, tumbling into Steve's arms. The scene before her felt almost biblical. The solid, reinforced cement wall split perfectly down the middle and opened outwards, as if someone was curling back the pages of a book. Their dark room was suddenly flooded with such a bright light that both Steve and Hermione were almost blinded.

A faceless horde could have been chasing towards them, and they'd have absolutely no way of stopping them. Luckily, when the person who had parted the walls spoke, it was with a familiar, female, Sovakian accent.

"This looks cosy." Wanda said, a wry, half smile on her youthful face. Hermione suddenly realised Steve's arm's had inadvertently wrapped around her, and her face was buried in his muscular chest. She could see Ron in the corner of the hold Wanda had created, looking furious. Quickly, she leapt to her feet, disentangling herself from the superhero, her face burning with embarrassment.

"Don't look at me like that, Ronald." She snapped angrily, as Steve and Wanda helped her carefully out of the compound.

Author's Note:

I have a feeling this chapter is going to be controversial...

I kinda jumped between Steve and Hermione's POV which I hope isn't too confusing. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the chapter! Thanks also to everyone else writing things to keep us entertained while we're stuck inside, you guys are the best! And also thanks to all the medical staff, delivery drivers, shelf stackers and every other person out there risking their health at work. Stay safe everybody x