What happened in Australia?

buckykingofmemes:

the important thing to remember about australia is that We Were Never In Australia.

no, really. we werent, we swear. 

peggy carter owes me a drink for telling this story.

see, the howlies operated mostly on the western front of wwii, and we were quite successful there, despite all logic and good sense. and, since we were headed up by the famous captain america, and we were the first integrated american unit, there was a fair amount of press about us. so we had a lot more say in our missions than the average unit, which was why, when we got intel on a hydra operation trying to smuggle some sort of superweapon into australia, we got to go after them ourselves, instead of just sending someone more local. we sent word ahead on what was up, packed our gear and took a flight to the port.

due to reasons that were never really clear to us, we wound up on a ship to australia instead of a plane, so getting there took quite a while. the ship was aussie-operated, a really great bunch of guys. but the thing about sea voyages? theres not a lot to do if youre a passenger. cap kept us all in shape, and we played a lot of cards, but often we would hang out with the crew on their off hours just to kill time, which was fun for everyone. and chain of command being a bit strange, we would up spending a fair bit of time with the captain and his xo. it was a cargo ship, so things werent quite as uptight as they might have been on a battleship.

anyway, by the time we made it to australia, we were good friends with nearly everyone on that ship. which says a lot about the kind of people they were, because the sort of people who get along with the howlies are rarely very sane. 

one of the great mottos of military life is ‘hurry up and wait,’ which was very much the case when we made port in australia. there was some sort of backup with harbor authorities, so we wound up docking but had to stay shipboard until the intel officer we were supposed to meet came around with the harbormaster. it was going to be a three hour wait, they told us, so we would up hanging around on the deck, killing time. 

the captain, it turned out, was sweet on a waitress who worked at a local pub, and we’d spent a fair amount of time talking to him about his lack of luck with her. as we waited, he mentioned that she was a lovely dancer but he had two left feet, which hadnt done him any favors with her. 

so, naturally, being the three-time brooklyn swing champ that i was, i offered to give him a dance lesson. 

picture, if you will, the sort of sea captain one imagines with a grizzled face and salty beard, roughly the size of a mountain. that was captain lee. he was actually bigger than steve, so he could take lead with me and not have it be too awkward, size-wise. and you dont get to be a swing champ without learning both mens and ladies steps, so i had no problem following instead of leading. i roped dumdum and falsworth into helping as well, since it was useful to be able to show him someone else doing the steps. we’d gotten him through the basic step, a few passes, and were working on aerials and drops–specifically, the sidecar, which is a complicated lift that i really shouldn’t have been teaching to a beginner. im told that you can google that if you want to know what it looks like, since its a little hard to describe.

the last lift in the sidecar is an almost-vertical handstand-like upwards swing, and, since i was being the girl, meant that i had to trust captain lee to catch me if we messed up, which, of course, we did.

lee had me upside down at head height, but he released unevenly, and i was coming down sideways instead of vertically. luckily, he managed to catch me over his leg before i hit ground, in what was accidentally sort of a classic princess dip. being a dramatic sort of bastard, i popped a leg and threw my head back, and lee acted like we’d done it on purpose. 

and then we all noticed the harbormaster and the intel officer, who’d turned up nearly an hour earlier than they’d said. we’d been so caught up dancing that we hadn’t heard them board, and most everyone else was watching the show.

they were not amused. the intel guy seemed annoyed, but the harbormaster took one look at us–big, burly, manly captain lee with my not-so-tiny self draped across him like a fainting lady–and he just said, “NO.”

and that was that.  they didn’t even let us off the ship.  it turns out the intel guy was there to tell us that they’d already caught the hydra op and we weren’t needed, so we just went back to france. we never set foot off the boat. and from what ive heard of australian spiders, im okay with that. 

so no, really, We Were Never In Australia.