It's AU time

[advanced]

Building 64 down in the East end of Brooklyn was not a fashionable place to live. The apartments were small, barely more than studio size, and the rent was pretty cheap. Not many people lived there permanently, most people only came and stayed a year or two to get enough money together to move onto somewhere better. But there were two residents who had been there a while.

Steven Grant Rogers, early twenties, who earned his rent doing tattoo designs part time to fund his college course, and occasionally dipped his toe into online art commissions. He'd moved in there when his mother had died four years previously, leaving him enough money to get by, but not enough that he could stop working. And right across the hall was Natalia Romanova, an aspiring ballerina from Russia. She was tough as hell, she had worked herself right through high school, paid her own way to America when she didn't even speak the language, and kept going through tenacity alone.

Somehow a friendship had struck up between them when Steve had been the first person not to look at her like she was an idiot or disgusting for not speaking the language. He'd helped her learn, and they'd been firm friends for the last three years. Everyone else was transient, coming and going, not really making an impact. Natalia had friends and a boyfriend outside of the apartment, but she sometimes worried that Steve never seemed to do anything but work and study.

Which was probably why he would be in his apartment when a loud crash sounded on the stairs outside. Said crash had come from a box of (now very broken) plates and bowls being dropped by the man just moving in to the apartment directly above Steve's, judging by the amount of cardboard boxes that were littering the hallway. He was tall, muscled, dressed in faded jeans and a hoodie with long slightly scruffy hair, leather gloves, and deep blue eyes.

Comments

[bottledblond]

Having lived his whole life in New York City, Steve wasn't prone to going to see what every loud noise was. Most of them were innocuous, or too far away for him to pinpoint. It had nothing to do with his own personal safety, sometimes he forgot that he needed to be more aware of his own environment, and just because he knew it was typical city noise.

It wasn't until the second crash followed by a curse through the ducts thst connected all of the apartments that Steve dried his hands off from the clay work he was doing and headed upstsirs. There wasn't an elevator in the building even if it was four stories up, a remenant of the old tenements that once filled the borough. And though Brooklyn was definitely gentrifying for young professionals and families, this building had not been touched. Most of the apartments were rent controlled and their owners sublet out to renters. That's what kept the place always so lively, and cheap, and still pretty safe. No one wanted to rent to people that were just going to make a mess.

Which was why Steve manned the stairs today. Mrs. Johnson, who had the place upstairs, had been a friend of his mother's. After her husband died and she moved in with her daughter, she has started to sublet the place out. If thst renter was already making a mess, Steve was going to tell him off!

He was wheezing a little as he hit the top step and then paused, blinking, at the blue eyed man trying to get his boxes together. He was hopelessly attractive in the way guys in teen movies were, which made Steve peg him for an actor, new to the city. He would probably be waiting tables with Nat soon, as both tried to make it big in a city that spit you out when it was done chewing you.

That said, there was no reason that Steve couldn't be nice. He cleared his throat and smiled.

"Hey. Need a little help?" Yep. Scrawny little Steve was offering his services here.