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[ailerons]

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 hangman

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[altercates]

Pour for four then, Seresin. [ a beat later: ] Por favor.

[ it's a little funny. with jake's shirt, the deck chairs, what he's pretty sure are daiquiris set out between the seats — it's inappropriately fitting.

he doesn't ask about the dress code. doesn't push about the location, though he would've preferred to be drinking somewhere with fewer eyes, fewer sightlines. steve isn't decided on what he thinks about jake seresin just yet. he's certain about the neatness of the man's morals (which is to say it's likely a bit smudged, but aimed dead centre at the parts that matter), but the details that fill out a picture are missing.

sam is exuberant in celebrating his downtime; he lives, and he lives for more than himself in ways steve can only imagine. nat is a coin toss between sticking around and vanishing like the ghosts of her past, reappearing as a different person, but also somehow the very same. and bucky— he doesn't know what bucky's like these days. it's a sore spot somewhere along his ribcage, a bruise he can't feel only when he keeps still.

he hates being still.

it doesn't stop him from sitting down opposite from jake, and the second jake fills up steve's designated tumbler he drains it all in one go. again, and again, until he's all caught up — throwing out a half-grin the way a kid grins with a stolen bar of candy held behind his back.

maybe they could ask someone to bring something to nibble into. he can't get drunk, to his frequent annoyance, but he can still upset his stomach acids.

(he tries not to think too much on why S.H.I.E.L.D. knew how to balance his shit right after he got melted out of the ice. he tries not to think too much in that direction at all.) ]

You like daquiris?

[ailerons]

[ Jake rolls his eyes. It's an expression that's mean but somehow goodnatured, without any real heat or focus. He doesn't even pull his sunglasses off, just sits up with a significantly easy flex of core strength, and does exactly that.

One, two, three, four. Each one poured out too quick to regarnish with a slice of lime, offered from the top, a broad hand spanning over the lip.

By three, he keeps his composure.

By four, Jake's settled back onto his chair, though he sits perpendicular, elbows on his knees. ]

I'm on vacation, [ he corrects, which is neither fitting nor true. Jake knows that it is neither fitting nor true. But that's the kind of bullshit that he isn't here to sell, the flinty undercurrent of disbelief and danger and what the fuck? that envelops him for just a second when he wakes up every morning, staring at the ugliest ceiling on the planet. Flirts with jumping over the fence again and never does, even though he's done it six, seven, eight times already. ]

More to the point, old timer, I'd say you like daiquiris. [ Pushing his Raybans up, throwing them a little haphazardly onto a little patio table. The metal clatters against the glass. Jake holds his own, many-limed, very-full, tumbler in his palm. The pitchers are more rum than anything else, really — the fruit's a misdirect. Pretty impressive he just shot back four.

Then again, ]

There is no chance in hell you've been around since '43.

[ Nothing like ripping off the bandaid pretty much immediately. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, as the saying goes. ]