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"Sir, I think you'll want to see this," JARVIS interrupted Tony, lowering the Black Sabbath that had been blaring through the lab.
"What's up, J?" Tony looked up from his workstation, in the middle of doubling the battery life of a Starkpad.
JARVIS took over the center screen on the holotable and displayed a shaky cell phone video. In it, a blond, muscular man raced through Times Square in khakis and a white shirt. Just as Tony realized that the guy was distressed, black SUVs lurched to a stop around him. The video zoomed in, fuzzily, then focused, just as Fury stepped out of one of the SUVs.
"Huh," Tony said. "What's he up to now?"
The figures began speaking, and though Tony couldn't make out the words, he could see the impact on the blond, as he looked around in bewilderment. After a few more words he followed Fury into one of the SUVs.
"Any idea who that was, JARVIS?" Tony asked. The man looked familiar, though he couldn't place him right away.
"The unidentified man bears a 92% facial similarity to Howard Stark's photographs of Captain America," JARVIS reported after a moment, pulling up several of the relevant photos.
"Son of a bitch," Tony dropped the little gadget he'd been fidgeting with while he worked. "You're right, that's where I recognize him from."
"I usually am, Sir," JARVIS said smugly.
"Can you get me any other footage from that moment, J?" Tony asked, ignoring the snark. "Traffic cams, other tourists, whatever? Trace him back to whatever building he came from, and find out where those SUVs take him back to? While you're at it, let's — no, I've got someone designed just for that — hang on…" Tony pushed his chair forcefully across the room, aiming for his half-buried desk. "And J, see if you can either clean up the audio or get me a good lip read of that conversation with Fury."
"Yes Sir," JARVIS said neutrally.
With a few more scoots, Tony made it to his desk and yanked open the drawer where he kept his AI drives. Rooting through them, he found KOBOLD and yanked it out. "Come to papa," he murmured.
While JARVIS could certainly hack things, and compile and organize data, he also ran a thousand other processes at once and was spread quite thin. For deep dive hacking — especially hacking that he didn't want traced back to JARVIS — Tony needed a specialty program like KOBOLD.
Drive in hand, Tony headed out the lab door and downstairs, to the server room. There, it was a simple matter of plugging the drive into the right slot on one of Tony's unused server farms. He had several, so that he could test programs independently of JARVIS, and so that he could run different AIs simultaneously without stealing JARVIS's resources. Once the program had begun to initialize, Tony returned to his lab.
"Lip reading and augmented audio completed, Sir," JARVIS said when Tony returned. "Estimated 96% accuracy."
"Let me have it," Tony said, flopping back into his chair.
Once again the video played, this time with bits of faint audio, interspersed with JARVIS's voice as he filled in the blanks.
"At ease, Soldier!" Fury said as he got out of his SUV. Captain America spun around to face him, and Fury continued. "Look, I'm sorry about that little show back there, but we thought it best to break it to you slowly."
"Break what?" Captain America huffed.
"You've been asleep, Cap. For almost seventy years." Realization slowly dawned on the Captain's face. His gaze darted around, he shook his head, and finally he turned sideways, facing the camera. "You gonna be okay?" Fury asked, somewhat stupidly, in Tony's opinion.
"Yeah. Yeah. I just..." Captain America trailed off, looking more bewildered and broken. "I had a date," he finished quietly.
"Well, that doesn't clear anything up," Tony pouted. "Except apparently Fury put on some kind of show that the Cap saw through, hence his little runner into Times Square."
"That would certainly seem to fit the data we have, Sir," JARVIS agreed.
"Which also means that, whatever they pulled, either it was totally subpar, or the Cap's a smart cookie for seeing through their bullshit."
"That would logically follow," JARVIS replied.
"It also means that he just woke up," Tony realized, "meaning that either they've been keeping him in a freezer for a while, or they just found him. Hnnn…"
Before he could ponder that further, another voice joined the conversation. "All systems initialized, Sir," KOBOLD said. Tony had patterned his voice off of Sam Elliott in the Yellow Rose — one of his favorite westerns as a kid. The deep, gravelly voice seemed a perfect fit for a program named after a folkloric mining creature, designed to dig up whatever dirt Tony needed. Of course KOBOLD stood for Knowledge Operator: Burrowing, Observing, Locating, & Decrypting, but the image stuck, nonetheless.
"Great, JARVIS, get K here up to speed on that Cap footage. Use the backdoor they made to hack JARVIS to return the favor. I want to know — in priority order — one: what they're doing to bring Captain America up to speed on the decades he's napped through. Two: anything they have on Captain America from my father's files. They said they turned everything over after that thing with Natashalie, but I don't believe them. Three: how they found him in the first place and how long he's been recovered. Four: anything else related to the Valkyrie and their salvage expedition. Five: anything else vaguely related to Cap, the Avengers Initiative, Iron Man, me, and any other superheros flying around out there. JARVIS, I trust you to filter what he finds and let me know if anything needs my immediate attention. Otherwise, let's say check in every three days."
"You got it," KOBOLD drawled, sending a shiver down Tony's spine. God, he loved Sam Elliot's voice! It had taken him months to get the programming just right to use it for KOBOLD, but it had been so worth it. Somewhere, deep in the dark recesses of JARVIS's files were plans that sixteen year old Tony had drawn up for his theoretical sex bot; featuring Captain America's face and Sam Elliott's voice.
"Alright, go forth and hack!" Tony declared, waving his hand like a starter's flag. Once KOBOLD's interface had shrunk back down to the idle station, Tony pulled back up the battery schematic he had been working on, and dove back into it.
o
"Alright, what's first on the agenda, J?" Tony asked as he dropped down into his chair. He'd changed out of his business suit after the Board Meeting, and back into his jeans and a Motörhead shirt, and was now ready to work. He'd been tempted to take the Iron Man suit out for a whirl in the beautiful California weather, but he'd already been warned by the Air Force about 'joyriding' in Malibu airspace.
"It has been three days, Sir," JARVIS replied promptly.
"Oh yeah? Let me have it," Tony said, then shoved a slice of the pizza he'd picked up on the way home into his mouth. He was generally eating better nowadays, but after the meeting he'd just had, he deserved cheesy goodness. And there were vegetables on the pizza, so that counted for something, didn't it?
"Regarding priority one, Steve Rogers had a brief meeting with Fury after he was returned to the SHIELD safe house," KOBOLD said. "The careful script that Fury's people prepared explained that we won the war, unequivocally, and that Europe had basically rebuilt, but implied that global conflict had more or less dried up after that. Rogers was told nothing about the Pacific Theater or Manhattan Project, the subsequent division and reconciliation of Germany, or any subsequent wars. Or police actions," he added snarkily.
"They also restricted all information that came out after the war that might have put America in a negative light, such as the turning away of Jewish refugees, and all information about modern politics or social movements for the last six decades."
"Well, that's not confidence inspiring," Tony winced. "What else have they talked about, if SHIELD's left out all the important stuff?"
KOBOLD easily continued, "Rogers asked about the status of several people he knew in the 1940s, including Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, and the Howling Commandos. He was told their current status, but not about their descendants or remaining family. He chose — for the moment — not to speak to those who are still living."
"Well, I can't exactly blame him for that one," Tony admitted. In Rogers' place, he'd probably be feeling a good dose of survivor's guilt over his youthful good looks.
"SHIELD's medical team ran a series of tests on Rogers, and are analyzing the results. Already a group has split off with the intention of attempting to synthesize the serum from his blood."
Tony snorted. "Yeah, that's not surprising either. I'm amazed Fury even waited until he was out of the ice."
"Oh, he didn't," KOBOLD said smugly. "He took samples at various times during the thawing process, and intends to compare the results to see if he can see the cellular repair happening in real time."
"Of course he is," Tony mumbled, grabbing another slice of pizza. "Totally predictable, these shadowy government agencies. All after the exact same thing."
"There's a standing memo to all SHIELD employees in his building to avoid talking to Rogers about anything beyond meaningless chit chat," KOBOLD continued, "and they're all pretty much obeying it. After a few false starts, he's given up on asking them anything beyond what their names are and what they're doing."
"That’s going to get boring quickly," Tony said. "What else has he been doing?"
"Sketching, mostly," KOBOLD reported. "Rogers was provided with sketchbooks and pencils initially. He was also directed to the gym and has spent quite a bit of time destroying the available punching bags. Fury's original plan called for him to be kept in a room resembling a 1940s hospital ward, and they had obtained several period books to that effect. Rogers has read several chapters of the first one."
"Regarding priority two, SHIELD has a dozen journals with your father's ideas, designs, and thoughts in them. These include two that are primarily focused on Steve Rogers, Captain America, and the Howling Commandos — both his impressions and memories of them as people, and the various ideas for equipping them that he pursued."
"JARVIS!" Tony growled.
"I'm already working on a plan to reclaim the journals, Sir," JARVIS promptly replied, "as well as the other knick knacks from Howard's office that SHIELD is keeping in the same location."
"Good," Tony grumbled. "God damned thieves."
"Per priority three," KOBOLD smoothly caught his attention again. "I'm still decrypting the reports on the actual salvage effort, but early, non-encrypted memos indicate that the search was based on one of Howard's journals."
"Of course it was," Tony muttered.
"Everything related to priority four is behind the same encryption, but from the limited timestamps I have, there's a high probability that the Captain was found almost a month ago, with Fury keeping him on ice until this week, while he arranged all of his tests and plans."
"Not ideal, but not as bad as it could have been, I suppose," Tony decided. A month to make sure that they could defrost him properly — and yes, set the scene to play mind games with him — wasn't unreasonable. And certainly much better than the years or decades that Tony had imagined at the outside. He was fairly certain that Howard couldn't have been convinced to keep the discovery of Captain America to himself — not with how much he gushed about the man — but Tony wasn't ready to rule anything out just yet.
"As for your final priority, the parameters are very wide," KOBOLD said. "More information has been found about several prospective Avengers, including yourself, Bruce Banner, an Asgardian named Thor, Reed Richards, Sue and Johnny Storm, Emil Blonsky, Charles Xavier, Hank and Janet Pym, and Carol Danvers."
"I do not believe there is anything time sensitive in those files," JARVIS interrupted smoothly, "unless you wish to collaborate with Dr. Richards—"
"Not likely," Tony muttered.
"—or Dr. Banner," JARVIS continued as though he hadn't interrupted.
"Eh, might be fun," Tony decided, "I'll look at those later."
"Very good, Sir," JARVIS said.
"As for yourself and your father, Fury's got heaps of information about you," KOBOLD drew them back on track. "I'd recommend JARVIS sort through it for the kind of things that you would find pertinent."
"Solid call," Tony agreed. "Make it happen, J."
"Of course, Sir."
"The only thing that my own programming identified as time-sensitive was the infiltration of Stark Industries," KOBOLD concluded.
"The what now?" Tony sat bolt upright.
"Approximately eighteen months ago, SHIELD Agent Romanova infiltrated the Stark Industries legal department," KOBOLD explained patiently. "While there, she compiled a dossier on Sir for SHIELD. However, she also performed several tasks for SI in line with her cover: composing and signing legal documents, acting as a notary, and bearing legal witness. All of these were done under a false name, by a person who is not actually a notary or legally trained. As such, every document that she touched is invalid and would need to be replaced."
"Son of a bitch!" Tony leapt to his feet. "J, get me Pepper and Alexandria in legal. K, good job; get back to it."
"Yes Sir," the AIs chorused.
Tony began pacing, even as he knew JARVIS was placing his calls. Natashalie — Romanova — had screwed up more than his ludicrous assessment while at SI, and he hadn't even noticed. Tony could probably blame that on the heavy metal toxicity — which he was still actively looking for a way to filter back out of his system — but he still should have realized in the meantime. That bitch had notarized and witnessed the forms that made Pepper the CEO, and if those weren't valid… Fuck! Tony had a lot of work to do to make up for Fury's game.
Suddenly, any twinge of shame he had felt at hacking into SHIELD fully evaporated. If he saw Romanova again, he was going to introduce her to a repulsor again, but this time with the glove on his own hand. It was one thing to fuck with his private life, and one thing to steal Howard's files, but it was another thing entirely to commit corporate espionage with SI.
o
"Sir, I have an update on Captain Rogers," KOBOLD said once Tony had clambered out of the Iron Man armor. He had to design a better system to get this stuff off and on! Perhaps some kind of reverse assembly line as he descended down the driveway into his lab. Or maybe on the roof. With all the sun they got here in Malibu, he could tinker with a solar-powered system — though he'd still need some kind of door to get down into the mansion.
"Yeah? Hit me," Tony said, heading towards the kitchen for something to eat.
"SHIELD finally replied to his request from last week to learn more about and speak to the remaining family of his friends from the 1940s," KOBOLD reported. "According to SHIELD, Peggy's children asked Steve not to contact her, due to her condition."
"That's bullshit," Tony snorted. "I talked to Aunt Peggy last week. Sure, her memory's getting a bit spotty, but she's still totally with it."
"I can find no records indicating that SHIELD actually reached out to Former Director Carter's family, unless it was a face to face meeting with their employee, Sharon Carter," he agreed. "It is unlikely that her word would hold for the entire family."
"To put it mildly," Tony smirked. He had grown up calling Aunt Peggy's kids his cousins, and he knew Sharon, her grand-niece. Sharon claimed that she didn't want to tread on the family legacy, but Tony knew it was a lie; she'd always struck him as just the wrong side of sneaky. A perfect fit for Fury and Romanova, apparently. Tony knew for a fact that Victoria and Will barely spoke to their cousin, and Olivia, Tony's favorite of the grandchildren, refused to acknowledge Sharon at all, after some birthday party mishap when they were teens.
"The two living Howling Commandos are Gabe Jones and Dum Dum Dugan," KOBOLD continued, which Tony also knew. He'd had lots of uncles growing up, and he saw them whenever they could get away for a visit. "Dugan is in the hospital, and Fury again passed on the message that his children would like to be alone during this difficult time. Jones was described as unavailable, with the implication being that he is homeless, or similar."
"Well that's beginning to paint a very interesting picture," Tony mused.
"Finally, yourself. Director Fury showed Rogers your SHIELD assessment, and several videos of your… teenage years."
Tony easily guessed what was behind that hesitation. "Which sex tape, J?"
"Ty Stone, Sir," JARVIS replied reluctantly. "Also the TMZ footage of your twenty-second birthday."
"Wonderful," Tony muttered, grabbing a bag of blueberries that he could shove in his mouth quickly and then heading back to the lab. He'd get burgers after he picked up his new friend. "Let me guess: the edited version that doesn't show the asshole harassing me."
"Astute as ever, Sir," JARVIS answered.
"Finally, there was a brief summary of SHIELD's work attempting to keep your identity as Iron Man a secret, implying far more effort than JARVIS recorded at the time, as well as the results of your press conference. After seeing all that, Captain Rogers declined to meet with you at this time," KOBOLD concluded.
"Yeah, no wonder," Tony scoffed, reentering the lab. "J, clear my afternoon schedule. Contact Vicky, Tommy, and Gabe and tell them to expect visitors this afternoon. If they aren't in New York, see about flying them there; send my jet. And have a car waiting for me at SHIELD's safe house in New York."
"Of course, Sir," JARVIS said as Tony began to climb back into the suit.
"K, find out how to hack SHIELD's physical security system. I want every door to open as I reach it. I've got a Capsicle to jail break."
"On it, Sir," KOBOLD replied.
Tony tossed the last of the blueberries into his mouth right before closing the faceplate; at least his stomach wouldn't be grumbling all the way to New York. Then he took off.
o
Steve reclined on his bed, staring idly at the ceiling. He'd tried drawing for a little while, but he didn't know what to sketch. He'd draw his friends, except they were all either dead or as good as, from what Director Fury had told him. When he was on the angry side of upset, he'd go give the punching bags in the gym a workout, but right now that didn't sound appealing. Steve honestly couldn't understand why Peggy and Dum Dum's children would block him from seeing their parents, even for a few minutes. They were the only link he had to his old life — a life that had been his reality just a month ago, in his mind — and it hurt to be excluded from theirs.
A distant racket caught his ears, and Steve perked up slightly. The halls were usually ghostly empty, save for the guards that were supposedly for his own protection, and the medical staff that he saw regularly. There hadn't been a commotion like this since the day he had run away thinking he needed to escape.
The commotion got louder, and now Steve could make out distinct words. "Stop" was most prevalent, but "Sir" and "Backup" were peppered in as well. Steve pushed himself up on his hands, debating what to do. On the one hand, he might be able to help with whatever the problem was. On the other hand, he wasn't positive that he knew exactly which side to support, if it came down to that. It might be better for him to remain neutral until he gained more information.
Suddenly a sound like a laser from a science fiction movie whined through the air, and a moment later it was followed by the muffled sound of a small explosion. That brought Steve to his feet, and he was halfway to the door when it swung open. He had a brief impression of the two agents lying on the floor, and then his brain caught up to the man who had opened the door.
Except he looked like less of a man and more of a robot from the movies. Steve thought he had a good idea what had made that noise earlier, at least. The garish red and gold metal had only just resolved itself into a person in his mind when the man spoke.
"Come on Cap; time to bust you out of this Popsicle stand."
"I'm sorry, what?" Steve asked, baffled.
"I'm mounting a rescue. Fury's been holding you hostage and this is your big chance to get out. Now are you coming or not?"
"I don't — I'm not a prisoner," Steve protested, even as he took a few steps closer to the man.
"Just because you aren't chained down doesn't mean you're not a prisoner, Cap," the man shot back. There was a noise in the hallway behind him and his arm snapped up. The futuristic sound whined again, and a bright pulse shot from his hand. A piece of metal flipped down over his face, which Steve belatedly realized he hadn't caught a good look at. "Look, Fury's been lying to you since the start, Cap. If you want a chance to see your friends, or to learn what's really going on, come with me now." His voice sounded different with the helmet down — much more like a robot — like the impressions that Bucky used to make, and it made Steve's heart ache.
He had a second of indecision, his gratitude at Fury for rescuing him from the ice warring with his discontent and all the little things that didn't add up. Finally he nodded and strode towards the man. "I'm with you," he said firmly.
"Great. I liberated this for you," the man said, reaching up and pulling something off his back.
"My shield!" Steve accepted it gratefully.
"We're going up against soldiers, but not enemies per se. Keep your hits non-lethal, if at all possible," the man warned. "And we're off!"
Steve followed him as they headed down the hall, then through a hole that had been blasted into the floor, with black char marks around the edges. A few soldiers in black uniforms yelled at them to freeze, but between Steve's shield and the man's hand lasers, they forced all of them to duck away. Down another hall, through another hole, and then Steve recognized the large glass doors he had run through on his first day here.
As the man barreled through the last remaining opposition, Steve followed eagerly. A dark red car — all sleek lines and curves — was waiting for them, and the man awkwardly slid into the driver's seat. "Well, get in!" he called.
Steve hopped into the passenger seat, shuffled almost as awkwardly as his rescuer, and then dropped his shield onto the backseat. The man pulled off his helmet again and it joined the shield, then he took off, the tires squealing as he veered into traffic.
Now that he had a moment to catch his breath, Steve looked at the face of his companion, and almost did a double take. This was Tony Stark! Howard's son. How?
Before he could say anything, Stark thrust his closest hand at Steve. "Look along the back of the wrist," he instructed, "feel with your fingers where you'd normally find that bit of bone that sticks up. You'll feel a round button that depresses when you push it. Gently, this doesn't require super strength."
Bemused, Steve accepted the hand and felt along it. It wasn't hard to find the right spot, and he pressed it gently. With a click, a whir, and then a hiss, the glove split apart in his hand. Stark pulled his hand free and put it back on the wheel. "Thanks, Cap. Go ahead and drop it in the back seat. Not on your shield, though! Wouldn't want it vibrating right back out of the car!"
Steve obeyed, studying Stark. He hadn't been impressed at all with the file and videos of Stark that Director Fury had shown him. He still wasn't entirely sure what to make of their escape from SHIELD, but Steve felt like he owed it to Howard to at least hear the guy out, as long as he wasn't being a jerk or a bully.
Shifting his free hand around the wheel, Stark awkwardly raised his far hand and held it across his arm. "Same as last time, chief." Steve easily found the button this time, and used the right amount of force to remove this glove as well, adding it to the growing pile in the backseat. "Thanks," Stark said, smiling at him in relief. Swapping hands again, he stuck out his elbow. "Outside, right about where your funny bone is, between the red sheet metal, there's another latch," he explained.
With little trouble, Steve found it and pressed, watching in fascination as the lower half of the arm opened. "There's another set up in the shoulder," Stark continued. "One on the front and one in the back, in the exact same place. It's hard to describe without being able to look away from the road, but if you kind of feel your way around the cracks, you should be able to find them pretty easily."
Even with the slightly more vague instructions, Steve was able to get the two latches with little trouble, and the entire arm piece hissed open, revealing the long-sleeved shirt that Stark was wearing beneath it. As Steve added this piece to the backseat, Stark wiggled his joints a few times and shook his arm out before grabbing the wheel again. "Much better. I've really got to figure out a better way to get this stuff off. Still, this beats the Mark Two! That took eight robotic arms, twenty minutes, and a dozen bruises to get out of! DUM-E almost took my hand off one time!"
Steve wasn't entirely following that last bit, but he understood enough to realize that there had been another armor that was much harder to get off. It suddenly clicked in his mind that this had to be the robotic Iron Man armor, from SHIELD's files. He should have recognized it from the pictures, Steve realized, but in the heat of the moment they had slipped his mind. He tried to study it discreetly, comparing it to what he'd seen during the war. It was almost like someone had shrunk down a tank and form-fitted it to Stark's body. Though Steve supposed it was probably based on medieval knights and their suits of armor.
"Anyway, hi, nice to meet you, I'm Tony Stark," he said cheerfully. "I'd shake your hand, but I don't have that much range of motion on the left side right now."
"Steve Rogers," Steve replied. "But you already knew that."
"And you already knew I was Tony, according to my sources regarding that farcical file that SHIELD showed you," Stark replied cheerily.
"You know about that?" Steve asked, aghast.
"I've known since you took that unsupervised jaunt outside last month and Fury corralled you again," Stark said. "I've had my sources keeping an eye on you, and he wasn't hurting you or anything, so I was letting you be. I thought at first that he'd at least try to bring you up to speed on everything that's happened while you were a capsicle, but I guess he didn't want you getting too curious." He half shrugged, making the armor on his left side groan in protest, and he quickly aborted the movement.
"Anyway, after all those lies they told you about Aunt Peggy and Uncle Gabe, I knew I had to do something, so I hightailed it on over."
"The files said you lived in California," Steve said, still processing the rest.
"Yep!" Stark smiled widely. "Though I get back to New York a few times a quarter. Still, you can't beat that California sunshine, can you?"
"But Fury just showed me those files not two hours ago," Steve protested.
"Yeah, I've got to do a little work on the thrusters. I should easily be able to shave that flight down from ninety-eight minutes to a solid sixty," Stark said nonchalantly.
"You flew across the entire country in ninety-eight minutes?" Howard had promised flying cars, but this was something else entirely. When Steve had used the train on the Star Spangled tour, it had taken days — almost a whole week! — to get that far.
"Times are a changin', Cap," Stark said with another grin. "You'd be amazed by some of the tech we've got these days."
"Sir, Mr. Jones is on the line," a new man said. He had a British accent, like Peggy's, but Steve couldn't see him anywhere.
"Thanks J," Stark said. "Go ahead and put him through. Also, I wouldn't mind some directions on how to get these SHIELD goons off my ass."
"I'll send directions to your GPS," the man called Jay said. A moment later, a new voice spoke loudly — Steve finally narrowed down its source to the car's dashboard.
"Tony, you there?" said the voice. It had a tremor, like many of the older people Steve knew, but there was still something very familiar about it.
"Yeah, I'm here, Uncle Gabe," Tony said. "I've got someone else here who wants to talk to you." Quietly, he added, "go ahead, Cap."
"Uh, hello," Steve said hesitantly. "Is this really Gabe Jones?"
"Lord Almighty it is you!" Gabe said. "I thought you were pulling a fast one on me youngin' — if I didn't know that that AI of yours didn't play practical jokes—"
"I mean, I could program him to do it, but that'd be a waste of time," Stark joked. "Anyway, I snatched Steve right from under Fury's nose."
"It was a very daring rescue," Steve added dryly, and was pleased when both men laughed.
"Oh, it's so good to hear your voice again," Gabe said. "We never lost hope — Howard looked for you until his death, and we thought that was it, but we still hoped… hoped that someday we'd find you. JARVIS said you haven't aged at all?"
"It doesn't seem so," Steve admitted.
"Woo-ee!" Gabe cheered. "I'd like to see that!"
"You're still in Atlanta, right?" Stark said.
"You know it," Gabe replied.
"My jet's on it's way," Stark said. "A car should be picking you up in — J, what's the ETA on that?"
"Mr. Michaelson is approximately twenty minutes out," Jay said.
"Twenty minutes, Uncle Gabe," Stark finished. "Toss your gear in a bag and get rolling. Bring Auntie Lanelle, if she can pack that quickly."
They both laughed. "Boy, you know it'd take her half the day," Gabe retorted.
"Well, the car and plane are both waiting on you. Get on up here as fast as you can," Stark said, then nodded at Steve.
"Oh, yeah, it'll be great to see you," he managed to say.
"Moi aussi!" Gabe replied with a cackle, reminding Steve of better days, when he and Jacques would tell jokes in French around them, knowing that none of the others could understand.
The call ended, cutting off the tail end of his laugh. Jay immediately spoke again. "Jeri and Thomas Dugan will meet you at the hospital, Sir. Victoria has to wait until she gets off work, but then she and Peggy would love to come visit."
"So it's a good week then?" Stark asked.
"She said so, Sir," Jay replied.
"Fantastic," Stark took one more sharp turn and then spun the car into a small, well-lit, garage. The door began to close behind them as he quickly turned off the motor. "Alright, we've bought about fifteen minutes," Stark said, fumbling with the door handle. "Would you mind giving me a hand with the rest?"
Steve was much less hesitant this time as he followed Stark out of the car, and then squeezed through the small gap between it and the door that had finished rolling closed. He easily unlatched the second arm piece at the elbow and shoulder, and then Stark talked him through the series of catches on the torso. He was able to do the legs himself, with Steve accepting each piece and placing it into the backseat for him.
Finally, Stark was completely free of the suit, save for a piece that glowed beneath his shirt. "Do you need help taking that off?" Steve asked, pointing at it.
Stark looked startled for a moment, then contemplative. "I know they glossed over a lot, but I thought at least they would have mentioned that," he said quietly. "I guess it didn't fit the narrative." Then, in one movement, Stark yanked up his shirt, showing off his chest.
It took Steve a moment to work out what he was seeing, but finally he realized that the glowing circle that corresponded to the center of the armor's chest plate wasn't on Stark's chest, it was emerging from it.
"It's a prosthetic," Stark said quietly, giving it a soft tap with his free hand. "Keeps me alive. You can see the scars here…" he traced out a few dark lines that emerged from it. "From the first version. I don't recommend suffusing your blood with heavy metal toxins, FYI."
Steve had realized that, based on the location, the prosthesis had to be cut into his breastbone. Steve had seen lots of guys in the infirmary during the war, and seen them missing all kinds of bits, including bones, with their skin sagging over the gap. "Is that normal?" He asked. "I mean, is this just what these things look like in the future?"
Tony laughed humorlessly. "Not even close, Cap. I made this one special. It's what powered the first suit too, to help me escape the terrorists that had captured me." He must have caught Steve's baffled expression, because he sighed and dropped his shirt. "Yeah, I know they skipped that part. Look, a few years back, I was kidnapped by terrorists in the Middle East, and took a chest full of shrapnel in the process. Another captive — a doctor — saved my life with the first, crude, version of this. I improved upon it, and used him as my lab assistant to make the first iron man armor so that we could escape. I'm sure Fury told you that I made it for fun, or to show off my tech, or whatever, but the Mark One? That wasn't even close to my thinking at the time."
"I'm sorry," Steve wasn't positive exactly what he was apologizing for — any negative thoughts he'd had about Stark after Director Fury's briefing, probably — but thankfully Stark smiled at him, no anger on his face.
"Eh, I'll give you the full story later. I'm sure it doesn't half compare to the war stories that you lot are about to grace us with, but I'll do my best."
Steve recognized that the moment was over, and he backed up slightly.
"Anyway, hop back in and we'll head out," Stark said. He slid into the driver's seat much more smoothly this time and turned the key. Then he pushed a button, and the back of the car opened, a piece of black canvas emerging from it. "Changing up our profile," Stark explained. "I'm pretty sure I lost them before I pulled in here, but on the off chance that they guess where we're going, this'll hopefully throw them off."
The door had begun opening again, and it finished just as the roof of the car snapped into place. Stark peeled out in reverse, and then took off again. When Steve looked back, he caught a glimpse of the door closing again before they turned the corner. "Anyway, I didn't have time to eat lunch, while I was heading out here," Stark said. "That's the one downside to using the suit over the jet. And I figured a super soldier was always down for some chow, right?"
"Usually," Steve admitted with a smile.
"Great! How do you feel about burgers?" When Steve nodded, Stark's smile widened. "J, my usual, and triple it for the Cap here. We're on a schedule, so have Jeff meet us at the curb, yeah?"
"Of course, Sir," Jay replied.
"Where are we heading?" Steve asked. He had gathered that Gabe and Peggy were both on their way here, but he wasn't sure where here was going to be.
Stark's expression fell slightly. "Uncle Dum Dum's been in the hospital for a little while. It's the end, they've said. You've got really great timing, by the way. Another few months and… well, I just know he'll be glad to see you."
Steve absorbed that. He shouldn't have been surprised; he could do the math on how very old all of his friends were now. And yet, finding out that only three were still alive had been a bit of a shock. Then he had found out that they — or their children — didn't want to see him, and he'd resigned himself to being alone. Now it turned out that they did want to see him. Howard's boy had even engineered his escape, just like Howard himself had flown that plane to take Steve behind enemy lines when he went after Bucky and the 107th. Clearly, the apple didn't fall far from the tree, in that sense.
On the one hand, Steve was so relieved that any of his friends were alive, and that they wanted to see him. On the other hand, he knew that they would be very different people than the ones he had known — they'd lived whole lifetimes in what felt to him like the blink of an eye — and they were not in the best of health. Could Steve handle the idea of meeting them, only for them to die shortly later?
Unconsciously, he squared his shoulders. He would. He was Captain America, and he never ran from a fight. Even if that fight was against his own emotions. Instead of being upset that he had so little time with his remaining friends, he just needed to be happy to get any time at all. And maybe even embrace the new generation, that was closer to his apparent age. Stark seemed happy to see him, and determined to befriend him, despite what Fury had said. There were others that he and Jay had mentioned, which Steve thought from the context sounded like Dum Dum and Peggy's kids. Maybe Steve could get to know them, and make some new friends in this time period. Maybe he wouldn't be all alone after all.
o
Steve crashed down onto the hotel bed with a flop. It was far more luxurious than the room he'd been given by SHIELD. Of course, Stark had booked it, giving only his name at the counter and then they were escorted upstairs. Howard had been like that too, and now that Steve wasn't looking at Tony Stark through the lens of SHIELD's clearly biased files, Steve was noticing more and more how like his father Tony was.
They both exuded power and control effortlessly, expecting other people's instant respect and getting it. From what Steve had learned today, Tony was also every bit the genius inventor as Howard, and he had expanded Howard's company profits to such a high number that Steve had a little trouble grasping it.
Another thing that had come up was Tony's love life, with the others asking him if he had any new gals or guys in his life. Steve had been surprised; outside of very specific neighborhoods, people didn't openly talk about that kind of thing back in his day. Yes, SHIELD had shown Steve the videos of Tony and male partner, but Steve had thought that was because of the taboo of being with another man. He still had to ask about those, once he figured out a discreet way to do it.
But hearing from Peggy's daughter Victoria that gay and lesbian couples were open about their relationships had blown Steve's mind. Learning that marriage between them had just been legalized in New York, and had been for several years down in Washington DC, where Victoria lived with her wife, had been even more astounding.
The conversation had gone on for even longer after Steve spoke without filtering his brain, asking when gay people stopped having to pretend to be in love with someone else. That had led to Peggy sharing the story of Steve keeping her picture in his compass case, despite the fact that he never even kissed her. He'd blushed and admitted that he had staged the shot with the camera man, hoping to keep people from realizing that he was gay.
Tony and the others had laughed at the story, and proceeded to tease Steve about being in show business, which was apparently a haven for gays, even in this time. That had led to Steve reminiscing about all the strapping stagehands on the Star Spangled tour, many of whom had flirted shamelessly with Steve. He didn't quite have the courage to admit what they had done beyond teasing, but it was enough.
He truly felt comfortable around the others, just like he always had with Bucky, Peggy, Howard, and the Howlies. Dum Dum had been confined to his bed, and had been asleep more than he was awake, but he recognized Steve immediately, and greeted him warmly. His son, Thomas, had followed in his footsteps as a strongman, and was a professional boxer. He went by the stage name The Dumbell.
He and his wife, Jeri, had three kids, and he had two sisters with children of their own. Steve had already promised to come meet them all some time soon. Peggy's two — Victoria and her brother Will — both lived in Washington DC, though most of their children were grown and going to school elsewhere. Steve had been told he couldn't refuse an invite to meet them, as well.
The other children of the Howlies were spread around the country — and the globe — and it would take some time for Steve to connect with them all, but Tony had assured him that he would help him use email and skype. Steve appreciated the offer, even though he still didn't really know what the words meant.
Finally, there was Tony. With all the other things that SHIELD had told Steve that he was now registering as lies — including the feelings of each of his friends and their families — it was becoming apparent that Tony wasn't the man they had portrayed him as. Sure, he was brash, and he definitely disagreed with Director Fury on most things, to hear him tell it, but Steve was no longer so sure that that was a bad thing.
Director Fury had been a Colonel in the Army, he had mentioned, and was in charge of SHIELD — Howard and Peggy's legacy. Those factors had led Steve to give him a certain measure of automatic respect, added to his gratefulness for being rescued and unfrozen.
Now, however, Steve was realizing that, just like other officers he had known in the army, rank didn't necessarily equate to right, or even good. While it was true that Fury had searched for Steve in the ice, and brought him back, Steve still wasn't sure why. He'd had enough of people using him during the Star Spangled tour, and he wasn't going to put up with it again.
The only thing was, now that Steve wasn't sure he could trust Fury, that didn't necessarily mean that he could trust Tony either. SHIELD hadn't come up with those files out of thin air, and literally Steve's first introduction to the man had been when he had broken into SHIELD — a government agency! It wasn't exactly the same as breaking into a Hydra bunker, and Steve still wasn't entirely sure how big of a threat he had been saved from.
Mostly, everything was just moving too fast for him. Steve had been racing through life during the war, but at least then he always had a plan and a purpose. There was a clear line between the good guys and the bad guys, and he never had to question which side of it anyone fell on.
Steve had spent the last month relaxing in quiet and relative comfort — something that they'd only dreamed of doing after the war was over — and had allowed himself to lose some of his tension. Now, though, Steve was thrown back into the thick of things: an escape; a torrent of new names, faces, and cultural references; and the blurring of the line between us and them. He felt like he couldn't catch his breath, despite the fact that he was currently lying on the softest blanket he'd ever felt, surrounded by casual luxury.
Steve just wanted the world to make sense again.
o
A week had passed, and Steve was faced with making some difficult choices. Dum Dum had slowly worsened over that period, though he always perked up when Steve and the others visited. His son Tommy said that all that energy left him more drained at the end of the day. When Steve had tried to apologize, Tommy waved him off, saying that the trade off was worth it.
Eventually, after that first hectic day, Steve had also found out what was wrong with him: late stage cancer. No stranger to hospitals and ailments himself, Steve was just grateful that the timing had aligned for him to see Dum Dum for a few days before he was too far gone.
Peggy had also been a shadow of her former self, and once Victoria — Vicky — had explained that she had Alzheimer's, it made more sense to Steve. Since she spent so much time in the past in her mind, seeing himself — young and healthy — had been both a good and a bad thing. She had spent several days caught up in reminiscing about the good old days with himself and Dum Dum, but there were moments when it was clear that she didn't realize it was just reminiscing, but actually seemed to think they were all back there in 1940. She'd make a small slip, like calling Tony 'Howard', or looking at Vicky or Tommy in confusion, or switching tenses, and Steve would realize what had happened.
At the end of the week, when Peggy and Vicky had to return to their homes in Washington DC, the latter had drawn him aside for a quiet moment. She warned Steve that it would be better if he stayed away for a little while, to let Peggy come back to the present. There would be a point at which she was almost completely lost to the past, when his visits would be comforting, but right now they caused confusion. She had given him a hug, and made him promise to visit her and her brother, even if he couldn't see Peggy, and Steve had agreed.
On the one hand, it hurt to think that his anachronistic appearance might hinder Peggy's progress, but Steve had seen it for himself. And it meant a lot that Vicky would explain it to him, and firmly insist that even if it wasn't a good day for Steve to visit Peggy, he was still expected to see her extended family. Instead of feeling rejected, or blamed, Steve found himself more and more interested in meeting this younger generation — who were old enough to be his mom, truth be told! — who weren't such visual reminders of all that he had lost.
Gabe and his lovely wife Lanelle had joined them that first evening, and other than Lanelle's wheelchair and general signs of aging from both, they were the healthiest of Steve's old friends. He had already promised to come visit them in Georgia frequently, so that he could meet their children as well.
Sometimes Steve thought that if he closed his eyes while talking to them all, he could pretend that he hadn't come forward in time, and that they were all just as he remembered them, sharing a drink together after the war was finally over. But their voices betrayed his memories, and even the illusion never lasted longer than a few heartbeats.
Perhaps meeting the younger generation would be easier, Steve thought again. In some ways, he already felt that way about Tony; he was his own person, not a shadow of the Howard that Steve had known.
Now, however, the week was over, and his friends — both new and old — had their own lives to get back to. Even Stark, who had excused himself several times for important phone calls or meetings, was a very busy man. Steve wasn't sure what would happen to himself now, as going back to SHIELD seemed distasteful, and he and Tony had never actually talked about the next steps. It felt awkward to ask, so Steve had avoided it until now.
But, standing on the tarmac, waving goodbye at the private SI jet that was dropping the Carters back in Washington DC before taking the Joneses to Atlanta, Steve wondered. As the jet taxied around a corner and out of sight, he finally dropped his hand.
"So, time to choose your own adventure, Capsicle," Tony said, as if reading his mind. Steve had noticed over the course of the week that Tony had nicknames for just about everyone, and since 'Capsicle' had caught on with the younger generation as an affectionate term, he no longer bristled when he heard it.
"I'm not sure exactly what you mean, Tony," Steve admitted, turning to face him.
"Well, you've got some choices to make, don't you?" Tony asked lightly, mirroring his pose and quirking one eyebrow up. "I mean, for all intents and purposes, you've finished the war, and you're finally able to go back home to Brooklyn, except Brooklyn's been replaced by some gentrified alien world. I know SHIELD was keeping you in the dark, but I don't know how fast you want to catch up, or where you want to do it. J's one hundred percent available to help you, though I'm working on something better, but—" he cut himself off and shrugged.
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have started such a heavy conversation out here. There's not a single drop of coffee to be had. Come on, my treat. I know this great diner in Long Island…" Tony began walking towards his sports car where it was parked on the tarmac — the top was back down and the Iron Man armor safely locked in the trunk — and waved at Steve to follow him.
Amused, Steve complied. In no time, they were sitting in a small diner, as promised. Tony was eating pancakes with extra syrup and a surprisingly healthy smoothie, while Steve loaded down the rest of the table with a little of everything on their breakfast menu.
Thankfully, his embarrassment at the amount he needed to eat, thanks to the serum, had faded pretty quickly. It was one thing to get several trays from the mess hall, which most of the beefier guys did, but it was another to be sitting around civilians and see that he literally had three plates to every one of theirs. After some friendly ribbing, and a story from Gabe about the time Steve and Dum Dum had had a brioche sausage eating contest, Steve had mostly gotten over his embarrassment. Now, he knew better than to protest about the cost or amount, and happily dug into his late breakfast while Tony did the same.
"Okay, so, back on topic," Tony said once he'd taken a few bites. "On the 'what's next for you' side of things. First things first: I really don't think you should go back to SHIELD."
"I didn't even think that was an option," Steve admitted.
Tony grimaced. "Not a great one. But, they're so heavily invested in you that if you showed up at the gates with an 'aw shucks' grin and told them you'd seen the error of your ways, or finally escaped from my clutches, they'd welcome you right back with only slightly suspicious arms."
One thing that Steve was definitely still getting used to was the way that Tony talked, and though the rest of their group did the same to an extent — especially with terminology — he seemed to be an outlier, even among modern people. Steve didn't quite have a handle on it yet, but he found that Tony was fairly good at explaining.
Even better — and more patient — was JARVIS, who Steve had been properly introduced to. He still found the idea of an artificial intelligence a little too futuristic, but then he had to remind himself that he actually was in the future. Howard had promised them all kinds of far fetched things, and the fact that he and Tony had delivered on many of them was something that Steve still struggled to wrap his brain around.
"You're saying that I could blame the break out on you, apologize for being led astray, and go back without a problem?" Steve asked.
Tony shrugged, "If you wanted to? More than likely. Of course, I think you need to do a cost benefit analysis first, to see what you actually gain from stepping back into the lion's den."
That, at least, was an idea that Steve was familiar with. The Army never made a move without weighing whether the result would be worth the risk. It was what had pissed him off so much about the refusal to try to rescue the 107th, but he had eventually come to appreciate it during their campaign to take down Schmidt's Hydra bases. Well, once Bucky had talked some sense into him, anyway.
"So what are the risks, and what are the benefits?" Steve asked.
"Well, we already know that they're trying to manipulate you with information," Tony pointed out. "That wouldn't stop, and in fact would probably accelerate if you went back. You definitely need to be brought up to speed on what's changed in the last few decades, but I wouldn't trust them to be the ones to do it. Who knows what kind of slant they'd put on things, or what they'd skip or gloss over."
It was a fair point, given what Steve had already worked out from the brief dossier that Fury had shown him on Tony himself. "Other risks?"
"They'd definitely put you under house arrest; make it even harder for you to leave the next time," Tony said. "If they didn't throw away the veneer of respectability and just lock you up 'for your own safety.'"
"Fury would actually do that?" Steve almost choked on his omelet.
"Fury? Maybe. I'm more concerned about his bosses," Tony said grimly. "I've been looking into SHIELD ever since you were found, and doing a deep dive ever since I discovered how they were manipulating you. Most American federal agencies are kept relatively above board and accountable, with the CIA being the dodgiest of the lot. But SHIELD makes the CIA look transparent."
"Plus, for what is ostensibly a US organization, that answers to the US Congress and President, I found several references to something called the World Security Council, who seem to actually be pulling the strings. Aunt Peggy never mentioned them — not that she was exactly sharing all of SHIELD's inner workings with me, of course, but I knew enough, between her and Howard. SI contracted with SHIELD for R&D, and that was all above the table."
"But this World Security Council seems to have come on the scene after Fury. What little I've found doesn't exactly cast them in the best light, and I honestly don't get why Fury is answering to them in the first place. The best I can come up with is that he needed international cooperation, and started trading in backroom favors to this group. Hell, maybe he even created it. Bottom line, they seem to think they have the right to tell him what to do with SHIELD assets — including any odd super soldiers they happen to fish out of the ice — and he doesn't tend to disagree. Those are the ones you need to watch out for."
Steve contemplated that as Tony dug back into his meal. On the one hand, Steve knew all about the ways that the government and the military ran shady operations to get things done. He'd literally been a part of it during the war, focusing on Hydra instead of the main Nazi threat. On the other hand, Hydra itself was a perfect example of a group of people who might have thought they were doing the right thing, helping their country in war, without realizing that their leader was a murderous madman with a demonic red under-face. Could Steve picture someone using SHIELD for their own gains, just as Schmidt had used those German scientists? Absolutely.
It was a little harder to believe that SHIELD itself, which had been founded by Peggy and Howard, could fall so far from the light in just the few short years since her retirement. And harder still to believe that Peggy would have chosen Fury as her replacement, without seeing the shadows of darkness in him. Unless he wasn't one of the bad guys, just a misinformed or mis-aimed good guy? That, Steve could believe.
"So, let's say that I don't want to get tangled up in SHIELD or the World Security Council or any of those other shady groups," he said. "What are my options?"
Tony quickly cleared his throat. "Well, first off, we've got to officially bring you back to the land of the living. I'm sure Fury was going to do it through back channels, if he was going to do it at all, and I'm equally sure that JARVIS would be up to the task, but there are a lot of different nuances involved."
"Such as?"
"Such as, do you actually want to be Captain America anymore?"
Steve didn't realize that he'd dropped his fork until it clanged on his plate. Staring at Tony, it took him several moments before he could clear his throat."Excuse me?"
Tony didn't smirk, but actually looked at him seriously. "Well, think of it this way. You're Steve Rogers, a kid from Brooklyn, right? And Captain America started as a stage name made up by Senator Brandt to sell war bonds, right?"
"I guess," Steve replied doubtfully.
"So, everyone knows that Captain America went off to war and became a big hero. And everyone knows that he then went into the ice and was lost. By now, pretty much everyone thinks he died. But what about Steve Rogers? Those are both really common names, and hearing them together doesn't necessarily instantly equate to the Captain. You could come back as just a normal Joe — or a normal Steve, as it were — and leave the heroing in the past."
Steve considered that for a moment. "What about you? You chose to be Iron Man, didn't you? You chose to get into the, as you called it, 'heroing' business, right? And now you don't want me to do the same?"
Tony held up his hands defensively. "Woah there cowboy. Not what I said at all. You and me, we're very different people. I had a bunch of different reasons for becoming Iron Man. Some of them were good, some of them not so good. But that doesn't affect whether or not you chose to become Captain America again. SHIELD's got secret files on a dozen people — regular folks who didn't ask to become super soldiers, or to have their lives torn upside down. There are a lot more of them than people who actually want to be superheroes."
"I didn't become Iron Man because I wanted to be a superhero! If I could go back, today, and not be part of that convoy, not be kidnapped and tortured, not have to live with this thing sticking out of my chest—" he tapped the reactor angrily, "—even if it meant giving up being Iron Man. Even if it meant giving up this technology? I'd do it in a heartbeat."
"Then why did you do it?" Steve burst out. "Why didn't you just go with the bodyguard story that SHIELD made for you? They arranged with all these people to be witnesses and everything. And you threw it back in their face!" And that certainly wasn't the way that Steve had intended to bring up the file that SHIELD had shown him, but oh well.
Tony rocked back in the booth, a scowl on his face. "I guess I should have seen that coming. Okay, Rogers, answer me this. Before you were a soldier, what did you do? When you were a scrawny little civilian. Did you work? Go to school? What?"
"I went to school," Steve gritted out. "And I worked for a book company, making the maps and illustrations and stuff for the books."
"Good deal," Tony said. "I bet that let you put food on the table. Now, did the publishing company hire the writers, too, or did the writers come to your publishing company?"
"They came to us," Steve said, "but I still don't know what this has to do with you becoming Iron Man."
"Getting there," Tony snapped. "Okay, so let's say that one of the writers came to you, and wanted you to change the illustrations a bit. Give the girl different hair or something. Maybe add longer fangs to the monster. Dictating your art. Did you have to listen? It's their story; did you have to do what they said?"
Steve considered that. "Not always, but sometimes."
"Okay, so what if that writer came up to you and wanted you to change the picture on someone else's story? Maybe they did a lot of research on it, or spent a lot of time on their ideas, but the story isn't theirs. Would you make the changes?"
"Probably not," Steve admitted.
"And what if you moved on to another company. A different publisher. Or maybe you were writing your own story. And that same former customer from your old job came up and tried to tell you what to do, would you listen? Hell, in this metaphor, SHIELD is actually more like a bookseller. What if a book shop that your old company provided books for came to you and insisted you hand over your creative talent to them, and let them control what you made from now on, would you listen?"
"No," Steve growled, getting thoroughly sick of this stupid metaphor.
"Then why should SHIELD get to tell me what to do with my tech?" Tony asked simply.
"You asked them for help!" Steve protested, not entirely sure how the rest of Tony's example fit.
"I really didn't, and if that's what they told you, then they lied," Tony's scowl deepened. "When I escaped from that cave in Afghanistan, and the Air Force found me, they brought me back to America. There was a "hey, Stark's still alive" press conference as soon as we landed, and during it, Fury's right hand man, Coulson, tried to waylay Pepper into having a meeting with him."
Steve had become familiar with Pepper by name and voice over the last week, as she often talked to Tony on the phone, and had shared hellos with the others. The rest, however, was news to him.
"Afterwards, while I was recovering, I met with the military, to tell the what happened to their soldiers in the convoy, military investigators, to help put their cases to rest, the joint terrorism task force, to tell them everything I could remember about the actual group that held and tortured me, and the Stark Industries Board and primary shareholders, to attempt to keep my company afloat. You know, like a responsible person."
"And on top of that, I was trying to figure out a way to improve this reactor in my chest that I made from scraps to keep myself alive short term, so that it wouldn't kill me in the long term! Meanwhile, Pepper is trying to coordinate all of that, and Coulson keeps hounding her for a meeting. They couldn't even tell her what they wanted to speak to me about."
"Stark Industries had contracts with SHIELD in the past, sure, but Obie — my father's partner — handled that aspect after Howard's death. I focused on the R&D half of running the company. If SHIELD was worried whether or not they were going to get their next shipment of weapons on time, amidst all the fuss of me being kidnapped, he was the one they should have spoken to. Not that it mattered, because our production factories didn't exactly shut down while I was missing. The only thing that slowed down — not stopped, mind you, just slowed down — while I was gone was R&D, because I was a driving force there. That and the Board Meetings got a lot more boring without me around to liven them up."
Steve didn't think he could interject, with how angry Tony had gotten, but even if he could, he wasn't even sure what he would say. Everything that Tony had said so far made sense, and the comparison to his artwork was becoming more clear.
Steve had still been caught up in the memories of how closely Howard had worked with the Army — and more importantly Steve and the Howlies — to think that his relationship with SHIELD might have been different. Or, more accurately, that Tony's relationship might have been different. He'd been so entranced by the narrative that Howard had helped found SHIELD, and hadn't really thought about how that relationship changed after his death.
If SHIELD had become just another purchaser, buying weapons from Stark — no, Stark's company — without any collaborative process, then that wasn't the same thing at all. And if Tony himself didn't even work with that side of the company, then Steve could see why he hadn't really had anything to do with SHIELD before his kidnapping. And after…
"Finally — and here's the kicker I'm sure wasn't mentioned anywhere in SHIELD's precious narrative —" Tony spat, "While I'm going through the process of healing, and getting back into my life, and trying to make sure that what happened to me never happened to anyone else, I learned that Obie, my father's partner, my godfather, was behind it. Obie was the one who hired the terrorists to kidnap and kill me, and they're the ones who decided to put me to work as their own private weapons manufacturer instead. Obie tried to kick me out of my own company, and then he literally stole the reactor keeping me alive out of my chest to power his own suit of destruction."
Steve gasped. Tony was right, that hadn't been anywhere in the file that SHIELD showed him.
"So, I managed to get the original reactor back into my chest, which was barely strong enough to power up the new suit, and I stopped him. Pepper and I stopped him, and not SHIELD. Then Coulson swept in at the end, with his suit, and his dark sunglasses at night, and his 'we'll clean all this up.' Again, without me asking, without my permission."
"I had to fight his retrieval team to make sure that they stayed the hell away. I didn't want one single scrap of SI tech to get conveniently 'cleaned up' into one of their trucks, never to be seen again. And you know, that instinct was right on, because I found out later that they had illegally confiscated a bunch of Howard's stuff after his death, including proprietary SI tech. So, you know, not exactly a shining beacon of truth, justice, and integrity there."
"And then, once I had my own SI team cleaning up the damage that Obie had caused, here comes Coulson again, telling me what was going to happen next. I still hadn't asked for a single thing from him, and now he'd prepared a press conference for me, and handed me a set of flashcards with my fake story to tell the world. His little speech claimed the suit was piloted by a bodyguard, and not myself, and you want to know why?"
Steve shook his head, though he wasn't sure Tony was even expecting a response.
Sure enough, he barreled on. "Because the second that I did that, they could trot out whoever they wanted, and claim that he was the bodyguard in question. And then, while everyone was focused on him, if I was to come out and say, 'no, you know what, it was actually me all along,' people would call me a liar and say I was trying to steal his glory after he did such a fantastic job putting his life on the line to protect me."
"And that would have led to me being forced to contribute an Iron Man suit to whoever this 'bodyguard' was, at least for publicity's sake. And from there it's only a tiny little step to him becoming the real Iron Man, and SHIELD getting their grubby little fingers all over my tech. All through the power of Coulson dogging Pepper's steps and me not wanting any of it."
"So, did they go to a lot of effort to make up an alibi for me? Eh, debatable. Did they do it knowing full well that it was a manipulation tactic designed to get even more of my family's technology out from right underneath my nose, to add to what they'd already stolen? Absolutely. Did I blow their press conference up in their faces by claiming to be Iron Man? You're goddamned right I did."
After a moment, Tony rocked back in his seat, then grabbed and drained the rest of his smoothie. Steve didn't know what to say to break the tense silence. He had let SHIELD tell him their side of things, and never stopped to think critically about why their version might not have been the truth. And instead of asking Tony about it politely, he had been confrontational, and made an accusation that he couldn't back up. "I'm sorry," he finally said quietly.
Tony relaxed minutely. Then he sighed. "Don't worry about it. I'm used to people thinking the worst of me without knowing anything about me. You're not the first and you won't be the last."
Well, that made Steve feel even worse. What kind of future was this where someone as smart as Tony was that used to being mistrusted? Or used, like SHIELD had tried to do? Steve had a decent strategic mind, according to the Army guys under Colonel Phillips' command who were responsible for that kind of thing. But he hadn't even thought of half of the problems that Tony had mentioned until they were laid out for him plainly.
"Still, I'm man enough to admit that I was wrong," he tried again. "I should have given you the benefit of the doubt — especially after I realized that SHIELD had lied to me about Peggy and the others. And especially because I knew that Howard was a genius, and a man of integrity, and you've shown me nothing to make me think that you aren't both those things as well."
Tony shrugged uncomfortably. "I'm used to not living up to that legacy either," he mumbled, and Steve wasn't entirely sure he was supposed to have heard that. But with his serum-enhanced senses, it had come through clear as day.
He sensed that there was quite a bit of bad feeling there, and the last thing that Steve wanted to do right now was upset Tony any further. "I'm beginning to think that every single thing in that file was faked," Steve said, instead of focusing on Tony's last cryptic comment.
A smirk slowly spread across Tony's face. "Oh, not exactly, but it's fair to say that none of it was exactly truthful. Feel free to ask about the rest now. Might as well get it all out in the open before you make up your mind what to do next."
Steve had already decided not to go back to SHIELD, but if Tony was willing to answer, he found his curiosity getting the better of him. "You know everything that was in the file?"
"Oh, yeah," Tony's smirk widened. "When I found out that you were alive and hacked into their systems, I saw everything they had on either one of us, including that dossier." Tony had already explained to the others how he had known that Steve was alive, and showed them the embarrassing footage of him running into Times Square, so he didn't need to elaborate on that.
"So in that file there was a personality assessment, and it ended with Iron Man being recommended for SHIELD, and you being rejected?"
Tony snorted. "Yeah, that's another example of their way of operating. Once again, I didn't ask to join SHIELD. I wanted nothing to do with Fury's little boy band. He even broke into my house to try to convince me to join, and I told him to get the fuck out. Then he sent one of his spies to infiltrate Stark Industries. She came in through the legal department, and we've had a hell of a time cleaning up that mess. Every single thing that she touched was compromised, and several big contracts had to be quietly redone."
"Every single person in my legal team has spent the last month cursing her name, since I found out, and I spread her picture around to the other big companies and military projects that Fury might be interested in, in case she tries again. Apparently she'd already weaseled her way into an Army project before SI, and the General was furious to find out about her lies. For us, if we hadn't been able to get every contract replaced, or if any of the people that those contracts were with had decided to take us to court for breach of contract, there would be nothing that we could do about it. Stark Industries would have been in the wrong, people would have lost their jobs, and at least one of them would have started an international incident."
"You would have fired people?" Steve asked before he could help himself. That didn't sound like the kind of man he was realizing Tony was.
Thankfully, Tony just rolled his eyes, but didn't take offense. "No, but two contracts were to create new divisions within SI and fund them. And two more created joint ventures with other companies. Without the contract in place, there would be no funding, no oversight, and no legal protection for either side. So that's about ten thousand people laid off until we can go back and do it correctly. I would have done my best to keep them from actually losing their jobs, but if the other side had chosen not to renew the contract, then there's nothing I could do about it."
"Fortunately, my head of legal is a genius, and she figured out a way to amend each contract slightly with some little useless clause. Like adding in a one dollar loan, or providing a clause that either side could meet again in a month to discuss the contract if they wanted. Stuff that wouldn't fundamentally matter, but technically changed the contract. Then, instead of both parties signing off on the amendment, they each signed off on the new, amended contract, in its entirety. Thus, basically, signing the original contract all over again."
"That's a relief, then," Steve said quietly. He hadn't thought about how much damage one person could do, and without even trying. But then he had never been the one with the head for business: that was Bucky all the way.
"Yeah. I also had a meeting with the senator who is nominally in charge of SHIELD, and brought along my military contacts. Three Brigadier Generals and two Rear Admirals stared him down while I informed him that if SHIELD wanted to get into the business of corporate espionage here at home in America, they'd better make sure their next spy was a secretary, or a janitor, or something else that wouldn't have the potential for massive legal and economic repercussions. I might have also pointed out that I had good cause to declare that the American Government as a whole had broken trust with Stark Industries over this stunt, thanks to SHIELD being nominally under his control, and was well within my rights to uproot the entire company and outsource my hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs to Canada or something."
Steve knew his jaw had dropped open, but he couldn't help it. He had lived through the Depression, and he knew that hundreds of thousands of people in New York had lost their jobs at the time. The idea of that many people alone working for Stark Industries was almost unfathomable, but the idea of all of them going through that kind of hardship was horrendous. Even if such things were better nowadays, it still made Steve's gut churn. "Would you have really done it?"
Tony shrugged and made a so-so gesture with his hand. "My first priority is the solvency of the company, because without that, all of our employees would lose their jobs anyway. My second priority is the employees. Would I fire all of them without warning? Of course not. Would I potentially outsource a new division to another country, hiring people there instead, so that certain people in charge realized exactly how much pull I have in the economy, thus ensuring that I'm never put into a position where I have to contemplate firing everyone in America? Absolutely."
"So it was a bluff," Steve said, a little more confidently.
"Only if no one calls it," Tony said with a vicious grin that made Steve want to change the subject, quickly.
"So you said that this spy infiltrated Stark Industries, and that's when the dossier was made?"
Luckily, Tony accepted the redirection gracefully. "Yeah. How much did you study in school about chemistry? Heavy metals and the like?"
"Not much," Steve admitted. "Bucky was always the science and math one. I struggled to wrap my head around some of it."
"Well, what it boils down to is that palladium — the stuff that made the reactor run — is a heavy metal. And if heavy metal gets into your system — usually through trace amounts in your food, or if you work in some kind of industry where it's always on your skin — it can really fuck things up. In my case, it was literally plugged into my circulatory system."
"Oh my god," Steve murmured. That definitely hadn't been in SHIELD's files. "And what does that… do?"
"Broadly? Damage to your heart, kidneys, liver, lungs — basically all the organs. Plus pain, GI symptoms, anemia, brain dysfunction, memory issues, mood changes, it weakens your bones… oh, and infertility! Luckily I didn't have to worry about it damaging my pregnancy, but other than that… yeah, I got the whole shebang."
"Oh god," Steve murmured again. He literally didn't have a better reply than that. Steve was no stranger to medical conditions and complications, but even for him that list was overwhelming.
"Yeah, well, the bottom line was that I thought I was dying. At the rate I was going, J had only given me a few more months to live. I was trying to put my affairs in order. I built a new suit and coded it to work for my best friend, Rhodey. I had this idea that he could take over being Iron Man for me, even though he was in the Air Force. I was kind of turning my tech over to them, and as it was hard coded to his DNA, it wouldn't work for anyone else. I trusted him at least to use it well."
That sounded far more responsible than SHIELD had made him sound. There had been one line about him giving the suit tech to the military, but refusing to make multiple copies, which was now making a lot more sense with the proper context. Instead of Stark coming across as selfish, his actions were about as selfless and responsible as possible, under the circumstances.
"I signed over the company to Pepper, though that was one of the documents that Natashalie screwed up, so that's since reverted back to me. Pep doesn't have the scientific bent to run R&D, or the inventiveness, but she's a damn good businesswoman. Stock prices were going to drop no matter what happened, once I died, but at least she would have been running things for a few weeks or months by that point, and the sky wouldn't have fallen. People would have given her a chance, knowing I was still in the wings and capable of taking back over, so I was hoping she could ride out the surges when the time came and I was no longer lurking behind her."
Which was also not the irresponsible throwing away of Howard's legacy that SHIELD had painted it as.
Tony sighed heavily. "And then, I was… I was trying to do some good. Giving away my stuff to charity where I could, having a little fun. My thinking was getting more and more compromised, but I was trying to do my best." Tony looked down at his empty plate and fiddled with his fork. Steve wanted to reach out and catch his hand, to comfort him, but he wasn't sure how well it would be received.
"Sounds like an impossible time," he offered.
Tony shrugged, but a small smile played around his lips. "Anyway, that's around the time that Natashalie — SHIELD's spy — infiltrated SI. Fury knew I was dying of palladium poisoning. They even had a palliative treatment that eased some of the physical symptoms. She injected it into me without my consent once she was done destroying my legal department and finally showed her true colors. Then they held Howard's notes over my head in an attempt to get me to play ball with them. I still haven't recovered everything, so I don't know if they explicitly knew that Howard had discovered the new element I needed to save my life, but there was a good chance of it."
"Hang on, they had a cure?! I mean, yeah, something to keep you going, but also a real cure, and they didn't tell you about it at the very beginning?" Steve felt a wave of fury wash over him.
Tony shrugged again. "Who knows. If I'd played ball with their bodyguard story, maybe they would have given it to me right off the bat. If I'd been able to replace the palladium as soon as I got to the US — any time within the first three months or so, really — the damage and long term effects would have been negligible. Now, there's so much built up in my body — down to my very bone marrow — that it's kind of moot. Unless I can figure out a way to scrub heavy metals out of the body — and believe me, I've got an entire medical R&D team working on only that — my life expectancy's been cut by about twenty years. Even if we can scrub out the palladium, that damage probably won't be reversible."
Steve saw red, and had risen from the booth before he even realized it. He had some people at SHIELD who were about to get intimately acquainted with his own shield.
"Hold on, Cap, where are you going?" Tony asked, startled.
"To smash Fury's face in," Steve growled. "Maybe Coulson and that Natashalie, too! I'll decide when I get there."
"Wait," Tony protested. "Let's not do anything we'd regret later."
"Oh, I won't regret this," Steve growled. "I didn't fight for America just for the government to turn around and do this to its people."
"Woah there, cowboy," Tony said, stepping in front of him as Steve moved to leave. "This isn't the government. SHIELD isn't the government. True, some pencil-neck in the government is supposed to be in charge of watching over their operations in order to hold them accountable for exactly this kind of shenanigan, but it isn't his fault that Fury's got him so snowed in so he doesn't know which way is up. The president and the rest of the government aren't accountable for Fury's actions."
His words mollified Steve enough that he was willing to wait for Tony to pay for their meals, and get into the car instead of walking, but he still had every intention of knocking together a few heads at SHIELD.
Tony managed to talk him into going into a nearby gym first, to take out enough of his frustrations that he wouldn't accidentally cause irreparable damage to the people he was angry at. That was something that Steve had had to come to grips with after the experiment; that his anger now had the power to kill people. In the Army, there was usually someone around the camp who wanted to spar for a few rounds, and Steve could practice with them when destroying used tires and things got boring.
The man behind the counter when they entered the gym attempted to stop them, but Tony had just waved Steve towards the punching bags with a lofty, "I'll handle this."
Steve didn't see what Tony did, but his enhanced hearing picked up the phrases "membership card" from the man and "this should cover everything" from Tony. He assumed that Tony had given the man money, the way Howard would have done, and Steve shoved it out of his mind as he laid into the first punching bag.
Over an hour later, when Steve finally dropped his fists and leaned forward, resting his forehead against the bag, Tony's voice startled him.
"You all done with your tantrum, Cap?" He had dragged over a comfortable chair shortly before Steve destroyed the first punching bag, much to the annoyance of the man behind the counter. He didn't say anything around Tony, but he was clearly upset. Tony had waved at Steve to ignore him, and Steve was still so upset that he had.
Now, Steve rolled his head to look sideways at Tony. He was looking up from the tablet he had been working on, and it occurred to Steve for the first time that Tony had given up most of his morning while Steve asked him to debunk everything SHIELD had lied about, and then gone off in a rage. And Tony probably had loads of important things to do for his company that he should have been working on instead. Especially if he was still recovering from the damage done by Natashalie — a fitting name, if a little too familiar for Steve's taste.
"Maybe," he said. "Although, I have one more question about what they showed me. And after everything else I've learned, I suspect that the answers will make me want to punch someone again."
Tony sighed. "Fair point. Alright, hit me with it."
Now that Steve had his chance, he found himself struggling to find the right words. It felt so deeply personal to ask Tony about this, and he didn't want to come across as too inquisitive — the last thing Tony needed right now was to think that Steve was interested in him; he was technically old enough to be his grandfather. "I — uh, well…"
"It's the video, right?" Tony asked tiredly. "Can't think of what else would tongue-tie you this badly."
Steve knew he was blushing, but he couldn't help it. "It was very… explicit."
Tony snorted, but didn't look up. "Yeah, it was at that. That's generally what happens when two teenagers have sex. Although, generally, one teenager doesn't secretly film it without the other's consent so that they can sell it to the media and make a quick buck."
Steve gave the bag an extra hard punch. "What happened to him?"
"Oh, Rhodey beat the snot out of Ty. Dad threatened to sue MIT because they shouldn't have been letting their students sleep together, like the school had any control over that kind of thing, and MIT expelled Ty to appease dad. The Stark Industries PR person spent several months trying to spin the story to emphasize the horror that I'd been filmed without my consent, instead of the horror of me sleeping with a guy. I became a bisexual icon as one of the few openly "out" celebrities and I decided to embrace my queer icon status. Now, every few years the internet tries to cycle the video around again," Tony summarized neatly.
"I had JARVIS scrub as many copies as he could access, but enough people are still out there who keep it on a hard drive or flash drive that isn't connected to the internet, so we can't get to their version. As soon as it's re-uploaded, however, he shreds it before it can make much traction again. For the most part, it doesn't embarrass me all that much anymore. You've got to develop a thick skin about that kind of thing when you're a celebrity."
"But you didn't ask to be a celebrity," Steve protested. "You were just a kid."
Tony offered him a small, sad smile. "Eh, that's the curse of anyone with famous parents. We're famous by proxy — as an extension of them — when we're kids, so we've got almost no choice but to embrace the limelight ourselves. Everything's already out there, and the media are already gunning for us. Either you run with it, or you fight against it."
"Are those your only options?" Steve asked quietly. The picture Tony was painting seemed so bleak.
"Basically," Tony snorted. "Although I make it a rule now, only to have sex in my own home — or cars… or jets — places where Jarvis can monitor for recording devices and remotely deactivate them. I haven't had a leak in decades."
That sounded even more bleak. Instead of Tony being able to enjoy being with a partner, he was forced to take precautions to protect himself, even from people who claimed to love him. Steve couldn't imagine having to live such a paranoid life. And then to consider how much others, like SHIELD, had done to erode what trust in humanity he had left… well it was little wonder that he'd hacked their system and kept an eye on Steve.
He was actually incredibly grateful that Tony had been the one with his eye on him, and not someone else. The idea that SHIELD could release the images and videos of his medical check ups, or of him changing clothes or something, made a shudder go down Steve's back. He wasn't that modest — the army had cured him of that — but at least he knew most guys weren't looking looking. If what had happened to Tony had happened to Steve instead… Well, he didn't know how he would have handled it. Certainly not as gracefully as Tony had.
"And now that we know that SHIELD has a copy, KOBOLD went ahead and scrubbed the video from their files," Tony continued blithely. "I'm sure they've got backups and redundancies, but we infiltrated one of those by backtracking their routine weekly backup systems and finding the source that way. Wow… I just used the word 'back' a bunch in that sentence. We need more synonyms for 'backup' in the digital world," he mused.
Steve hadn't followed most of that digression, but he wasn't sure that he needed to. The bottom line was that SHIELD had copies of Tony's tape, and were clearly using them for unscrupulous purposes, like showing part to Steve with the wrong context. And if JARVIS or the other program he mentioned could delete those copies, that was all to the good.
"So, at the risk of completely derailing the conversation off of this annoying topic," Tony said with a small smirk. "How about you? Bisexual, or totally Gay?"
The blush was back in full force, and Steve concentrated on the punching bag again. He hadn't intended to make this about himself, or make Tony think he was attracted to him. Even if he was, slightly. Maybe. In a very respectful, old enough to be his father, kind of way.
"I'm gay," Steve admitted. "Never really felt that way about women, though I tried to, because you were supposed to. Bucky knew and didn't care. I know some people around the neighborhood thought we were together — like as a couple — because I moved in with him after my mom passed. But Buck and me, we were never like that. We were like brothers."
"Hey, I get it," Tony said with a genuine smile. "That's like me and Rhodey. Every so often someone tries to make like he and I are a thing, and they have done since we were at MIT together. It's a bit of a bigger deal for him, though, because that could get him kicked out of the military. I've had to put some people down hard about that in the past."
"Yeah?" Steve asked cautiously. He wanted to know more, but he didn't want to pry.
Tony's full blown smirk was back. "Yeah well, I start by asking the person in question if they're gay or straight, and they're almost always straight. And then I ask them to name their best friend of the opposite gender. Someone who's so close to them that they're practically siblings. And once they've done that, I say, 'now imagine the thought of sleeping with that person'. And usually they go cross-eyed with disgust, because outside of a few regions of the country that I never want to visit, sleeping with someone that's like a sibling to you is just not okay. And then they tend to drop the topic."
"Bucky just used to laugh at people who thought he was gay," Steve said with a grin of his own at the memories. "Though it came to blows a couple of times. There was this big jerk who lived down a couple blocks, who worked at the same factory as Buck, and he'd call him 'gay' and 'punk', trying to pick a fight at work and get Bucky fired."
"What happened?" Tony asked.
"Well, being Bucky, he went down to the gay speakeasy a few blocks away, and told them about what John had been saying. And then a handful of the biggest, meanest, wolves from the speakeasy followed him back and caught John coming out of the factory that night. The last I heard, once he got out of the hospital, he moved across the borough."
Tony laughed, and Steve pushed away thoughts of what a nice chuckle it was. "That's one way to take down a homophobe!" Tony cheered. "So, ready to head out?" he asked once he'd calmed down.
"Yeah," Steve agreed, shaking out his hands. He really should have taped them, but he had been too unfocused when he had started. As they left the gym and headed for Tony's car, he considered his reaction. Steve hadn't felt so possessive about another person except Bucky. Was his need to punish the people who had hurt Tony just because they were becoming good friends too?
Or maybe the serum had amplified his emotions on this topic, like it amplified his strength and eyesight. That was basically what Dr. Erskine had said it would do, wasn't it? He didn't know the science well enough to be sure, but he thought that was what the doctor had meant by 'good becomes great.'
It was probably that, Steve decided. There wouldn't be any other reason for him to be so affected by what Tony had gone through; not when he'd only known him a week.
o
It had only taken six months to bring the Cap up to speed on the finer points of modern life. While Steve was still getting settled into the Mansion — Tony had been horrified to realize that he literally only had the clothes on his back, and had taken him on a whirlwind shopping spree that included outfitting one of the empty guest suites in the mansion — Tony had taken a few days to bash out a rough AI for him.
TEACHR, or Technical Enhanced Autonomous Classroom Helper Robot, had the ability to analyze, combine, and take the best examples from thousands of syllabi and lesson plans on the web, and studied every lecture available to train herself to become a better professor. She could run calculations on what the most important details from History were, and what would be the most relevant to Steve, and pared down the information he needed so that he wasn't overwhelmed by the sheer scope of something like the internet, the way he would have been if SHIELD had let him just stumble onto Wikipedia by himself or something.
Furthermore, TEACHR was designed to learn from Steve and adapt her teaching style to match his learning style, finding connections that would interest him. Learning about the man's interest in — and talent for — art, Tony had made sure to include an art history curriculum, and tweaked the algorithm to include Bob Ross as a prominent individual of his time.
Tony had also given it a voice that sounded a lot like Pepper because a) she could keep even the most wandering mind on task, and b) he didn't want Steve to fall in love with TEACHR. If Tony had given the teaching bot KOBOLD's Sam Elliot voice, or JARVIS's firm, soothing one, who knows what catastrophe might occur.
But it wasn't all work and no play. TEACHR was designed to instruct Steve in increments, and included breaks for art, exercise, and entertainment. Of course, if those movies also happened to be vaguely educational, while also making Tony's pop culture references more understandable, well that was a win-win for everyone!
Shortly after Steve started his lessons, he had begun to ask JARVIS to invite Tony to watch the movies with him. Sometimes he had unavoidable meetings — an unfortunate side effect of resuming his role as CEO of SI — or was neck deep in a project that he couldn't divert his attention from. But if not, Tony was more than happy to take a break, and tinker with new designs on his Starkpad, or work on tightening the rotors in the Iron Man boot, while also watching the original War of the Worlds, or something from Disney or Mel Brooks.
As time went on, Tony noticed that more often than not, Steve would also bring one of his sketch pads, and practice drawing the characters or scenery from the movie. It was a way to keep his hands busy, Tony realized, just like tinkering was for him. And Steve's explanation — that he was practicing different styles, or doing movement studies — made sense too, once Tony understood what those were.
Pepper had teased Tony when he repeated something Steve had said the night before, apparently getting some art term wrong in the process. So sue him! Pepper was the art aficionado in their little family, not him! Still, Tony resolved not to get caught out again, especially since between Pepper and Steve he was now outnumbered. And if his workshop was host to his own TEACHR working him through an art and art history course more often than it was blaring AC/DC for a few months, well that was a small price to pay to be right in the future.
But, after six months, Steve had completely caught up to the modern day, including the highlights of world and American history, politics, scientific and medical advancements (for the layperson), literature, and economics. He'd also caught up on the fun stuff, like music, theater, movies, pop culture, and celebrity gossip.
TEACHR had even snuck in some extras, like physics as it pertained to combat and the way he threw his shield around. It was something that Steve had gotten used to inherently calculating, without actually understanding the science behind it. Then there was anatomy, the way it was taught in the military. America wasn't at war, but if Steve was ever going to work as a crime fighter or superhero — or just stop a random mugging — he needed to know how to keep from unintentionally killing people with his super strength.
Steve and Peggy had regaled the group that first week with a story about Steve glancing at a Hydra map while rescuing the 107th, and then perfectly recreating it for Colonel Phillips later. While Steve waved it away as a factor of how many maps he had drawn for work at the book publisher, Tony had an idea.
When TEACHR introduced elements of geology, geography, and cartography, Steve absorbed it easily. He had a brilliant eye for scale, and a great memory for names, shapes, and relative locations. TEACHR and JARVIS theorized that those traits had contributed to his ability to calculate bounce trajectories in his mind when throwing his shield.
Steve expressed a fondness for foreign languages, having heard so many growing up and again in Europe. He hadn't done well learning them by osmosis as a child, but Tony had read all of Howard's and Erskine's data on both the serum and Steve himself that SHIELD had, and he had some theories about the way it might have affected his brain.
With Tony giving the parameters, TEACHR researched the best way to proceed. As it happened, relating to language through art terminology, and with place names, helped it all click for Steve. His natural ability to picture places went hand in hand with imagining their name in whatever language he wanted. That was especially true for places that were named for themselves. He had been in dozens of 'Wald's in Germany, for example, and learning that 'Wald' just meant 'forest' had sealed the word into his mind. It was the same as learning that "chiaroscuro", the painting technique of using strong lights and darks, was literally just the Italian words for light — chiaro — and dark — oscuro — squashed together. At least, that's what Steve and TEACHR had determined.
Since Steve had already picked up a bit of French during the war, between living in the country and working closely with Jacques, he chose to study French primarily. Tony tried not to read anything into the fact that the second language he picked up was Italian — one that Tony himself spoke. It was just because so many painting terms were Italian, right?
The final area of study for Steve, which TEACHR had struggled with, Tony had laid on Rhodey's shoulders. Since Tony had all of Dr. Erskine's notes that had been in SHIELD's files, he was aware that Steve had never actually completed basic military training. He had been pulled out of Basic when Erskine and Howard had been ready to perform their experiment, and had gone straight from there to Brandt's publicity tour.
When Steve actually made it to Europe on the USO circuit, he had bailed on the Star Spangled troupe and gone after the 107th, after which people tended to call him by his stage name, Captain America. When Tony and a sworn-to-secrecy Rhodey had questioned him on it, Steve admitted that he had gotten a good bit of mileage out of his supposed rank, especially when he defied Colonel Phillips' orders. With all the men calling him Captain, it had just stuck.
It quickly became apparent that Steve missed the military, and while Tony had no idea what to do with that, Rhodey understood right away. As he explained it to Tony, Steve's life was in a bit of an upheaval, as he basically jumped sixty five years into the future. The military was something that he knew, something familiar, with a structure that hadn't changed much since the 1940s. TEACHR had concurred that — from a mental health perspective — it would be good to give Steve back that familiarity and community.
Put like that, Tony couldn't disagree, so he and Rhodey brainstormed how to make it happen. Together, they reached out to SI's Army contact, Brigadier General Dixon, and swore him to secrecy regarding Steve's return to the land of the living.
Once Dixon understood the situation, and the inadvertent mistake that had been made during the war, he was eager to jump on board with getting Steve up to scratch as a real Captain.
So, once Steve was all caught up to the present day, and had picked out a suitable alias, JARVIS had whipped up a false birth certificate, college degree, and other necessary paraphernalia. Then Dixon had enlisted Steve in the 10-week Basic Combat Training course at Fort Benning, after which he was immediately going to be shuffled into the 12-week Officer Training Course. It was a month shorter than the version Steve would have taken back in the 1940s, though it covered much more information.
And now Steve was off, flying away to start BCT, leaving Tony alone in his mansion. He had made a joke, of course, about not having Steve underfoot anymore, but looking out at the empty living room, Tony found himself already missing Steve.
They'd only been living together — and didn't that phrasing imply far more bedroom fun than they'd actually had! — for six months, and after just four hours apart Tony already missed Steve way more than he'd expected.
It was almost like… oh damn. "JARVIS?" Tony asked, sinking down onto the couch, staring at the sky outside.
"Yes Sir?" JARVIS asked evenly.
"Have you been keeping up with our Pat Benetar protocol?"
"Always, Sir," JARVIS replied a little smugly.
"And with Steve?"
"I'm afraid you're currently sitting at a 8/10 on the Heartbreaker scale, Sir." JARVIS said.
Tony flopped his head back against the couch. "Well, fuck."
Seven and above meant that he was totally pinning, and eight meant that he was well on his way to being totally head over heels for Steve.
At least he had the next five months, while Steve was gone for his Army training, to get his head on straight. The last thing Steve needed while trying to acclimatize to this century was someone like Tony mooning over him.
o
It wasn't until he was on the long cross-country flight — there were definitely benefits to knowing Tony, and the roominess of his private jet was certainly one of them — that Steve finally allowed himself a little sigh of relief. It wasn't that he wanted to get away from Tony — quite the opposite! — but that was exactly why he needed to get away from him.
Steve had had crushes before, though he hadn't told anyone but Bucky about them. And he'd already noticed how attractive Tony was; that was obvious upon first meeting the man. Tony was very open about pretty much every topic in the process of catching Steve up with modern society, and that included sex and sexual health, much to Steve's embarassment.
Though Tony was a bit self-conscious about the arc reactor in his chest, he was otherwise very comfortable with his body. They'd gone swimming several times in the mansion's pool, and those tight swimming briefs he wore gave Steve's imagination far more fodder than he needed! As if his artist's eye for body composition hadn't given him enough. It had been made abundantly clear that Howard's boy — as Steve had first thought of him — was no boy, and his body was glorious proof of that.
But there was a difference between finding a man attractive and being attracted to him. And that's where Steve ran into trouble, because he was hopelessly attracted to Tony. He'd tried to tell himself that it was the proximity — Tony was the only person he saw on a regular basis, so it was only natural that Steve would develop an interest in him out of a lack of options.
He firmly ignored the fact that he'd lived with Bucky for several years as well and never seen him as anything more than a brother. It also didn't account for the part where he also felt nothing for the objectively good looking Rhodey, who visited frequently.
Getting away from Tony certainly wasn't the only reason that Steve was coming to Georgia. He really did want to complete the army training courses and earn his rank properly. But he also couldn't hide his relief that he was going to be separated from Tony for a little while to get his head on straight. And he might even meet someone handsome in Georgia, and become attracted to them instead. That was a possibility, right? Surely the weeks in close quarters with those men would have the same effect as the last six months living with Tony.
Steve firmly told himself that that was the case as the states blurred by beneath the window. A little distance was the perfect way to overcome his ridiculous crush.
o
Six months later, after completing his Army basic and officer training, Steve found himself in the same seat on the jet, heading back to California. As he settled into his seat, he couldn't help the wave of nostalgia that washed over him. He imagined that this is how he might have felt once the war was over, with him and Bucky on a transport back to New York.
The feeling of coming back home to their little apartment was something that he and Bucky had talked about quietly, when everyone else was asleep. Lying in his bedroll, looking up at the stars, he and Bucky could always say the things that they struggled to put into words in the light of day. Steve had promised that they could come back to their little apartment, and had joked about their landlord renting it out to someone else in the meantime. Bucky had chuckled and said that with his new physique Steve would just need to glare down at Mr. Murphy and he'd have the keys back for them in an instant.
But that hadn't happened. Bucky had died, and Steve had woken up in a fake hospital ward at SHIELD instead. Now, coming back from his training in Georgia, Steve wasn't entirely surprised to realize that returning to Tony's Malibu mansion felt like coming home.
Steve couldn't even delude himself in the knowledge that that feeling of home, of safety, was purely about the house and JARVIS's impressive security. Because it was about eighty percent about Tony.
It had taken him a few weeks in basic training until Steve had a moment to really think, but lying on his bunk one night — not at all the same as looking up through European trees at slightly different constellations than he was used to, and yet strangely comforting — he finally came to a conclusion. He had tried to delude himself that his attraction to Tony was about proximity, but that was a lie.
There were several men in his training cadre that Steve would label as attractive. One had even given Steve appreciative looks when he thought he wasn't looking. If Steve was looking for someone to date after training was over, he could have easily picked Mark.
And yet, when he closed his eyes, Tony was who he saw. Mark and the others — even the ones in Officer Candidate school, who were all smart and dedicated and full of other admirable qualities — just couldn't measure up to Tony. After almost six months apart, now Steve could say with certainty that it wasn't a crush, or infatuation, or gratitude, or proximity, or lack of choices. No, he was head over heels in love with Tony.
If Bucky had been here, he would have been laughing his ass off at how hard Steve had fought against that realization. He was probably sitting somewhere in the afterlife with Dum Dum and the others, eating popcorn like they were at the movies, roaring with laughter at how obtuse Steve had been.
That thought cheered him up slightly, but didn't help Steve with what to do about his immediate problem. He was about to be back in the same state as Tony, living in the same house as him, and he was in love with the man! What could he possibly do about that? Steve even thought of the man's home as his own, the same way his and Bucky's apartment had felt. It was kind of pathetic how far gone he was on Tony.
But despite knowing that Tony was bisexual, Steve hadn't gotten any other signs from him. Tony flirted with most people as easily as he breathed, and yet he barely did it with Steve. He even flirted with Rhodey more than Steve! Rhodey, who was both straight and like Tony's brother, and he got saucy winks and comments layered with innuendo and silly lines from romance movies.
And Steve got a more distant, brotherly affection. He certainly didn't think Tony disliked him, he just didn't like like him.
Their six months apart had clarified things for Steve, but nothing had changed on Tony's end. So his feelings would just need to stay locked away, never to see the light of day, just like his feelings about the war, or losing Bucky, or coming forward in time. Steve wouldn't replay all of Tony's kindness by making an unwanted pass at him.
o
Tony emerged from his lab and made a beeline up the stairs to the kitchen. He'd survived on snacks for most of the past day while focused on his work, but now his stomach was telling him that coffee and granola bars weren't gonna cut it any more.
Of all the side effects from the palladium, the wear and tear on his body was the one that was the most obvious to Tony, day to day. Sure, the pain around the reactor and his compromised lung function were constant problems, but those were true with the Starkanium core too. The fact that he could no longer subsist on coffee and pizza and work for three days at a stretch without a break? That was all due to the lingering palladium.
Pepper might be thrilled that Tony was eating more healthily — though she did give him the side eye whenever he drank a dark green smoothie, remembering the stuff that he'd gagged down while hiding his poisoning from them all. He tried to drink something with more fruit or colorful veggies in it whenever he knew she'd be around, just to spare her the memories. Still, for all that she cheered at the prominent placing of fruits and veggies in his new diet, Tony mourned his old standards, now relegated to occasional snacks.
Being a responsible adult sucked sometimes.
As he reached the kitchen, Tony was pleasantly surprised to find that the coffee pot was already filled; the contents still warm. As he poured himself a mug, Tony glanced around the room, finally realizing that the living room wasn't empty. Padding closer, he saw Steve, crashed out on the couch, surrounded by books, notebooks, and a dozen colorful highlighters, as well as an empty coffee mug.
Tony had been surprised, at first, when Steve had come back from Georgia and shyly admitted that he wanted to go to college. He'd explained that he'd taken a few art classes here and there while working, mostly to learn new techniques, but that he'd always been impressed by the guys who had the time and money to go to school full time and earn a degree. After his crash course on the future, where an even higher status was placed on the well educated, Steve was sold.
Tony wasn't sure if his own list of degrees had influenced Steve, and JARVIS wouldn't tell. It was for the best, probably, since if the answer was 'yes', Tony had no idea what he would do with that information.
Having no idea how late Steve had been up studying, Tony decided to let him sleep. He quietly snuck back to the kitchen and gathered a bagel and a handful of produce. He'd revise his plans and return to the lab, using the backup blender down there, rather than make his smoothie up here and wake Steve up.
Thanks to his experience with actual combat, and his serum enhancements, Steve had breezed through both the strategic and physical aspects of both Army training courses. He lagged behind his counterparts slightly in the classroom subjects, but it wasn't enough to hold him back. And at the end of his training, instead of emerging a second lieutenant, Steve had officially jumped up to Captain, in light of his prior war experience. An argument had been made to make him a Major, but Steve desisted, not wanting to raise any higher than he already was.
In a small private ceremony attended by Tony, Rhodey, Pepper, Steve's remaining friends and their families, his training officers, and the Brass who had greased the wheels of their little subterfuge, Dixon had also officially awarded Steve a number of medals that he had earned in the war, including several posthumous ones that had been discretely revised to reflect his living status. No one had clapped louder than Peggy and Gabe, and Tony had enjoyed the looks of awe on the training officers when they realized that they had had the Captain America in their cadre. Then, with modern uniforms, his legally earned Captain's bars, and a chest full of medals, Steve had quietly slipped back into Tony's Malibu mansion.
For Tony, who was certain he would pass with flying colors, the most surprising thing about Steve's training was how much he had gotten used to living with the other man in just a short six months. It had taken him much longer to get used to Pepper, and they had never lived together full time.
It amazed him how little time it had taken before seeing another pair of shoes by the door, or of washed dishes in the drying rack, or one of Steve's books on the living room table, became totally commonplace. And what was more, it amazed Tony how much he missed those things when they were gone. He found himself leaving his lab and wandering upstairs to watch a movie, before realizing that he would be the only one there. Eventually, he got back into the habit of watching things on his own, down in the lab, but the action felt lonelier than it had before.
It had taken Tony the better part of the five months that Steve was gone to realize that he had a legitimate crush. Unlike his teenage crush on the semi-imaginary Captain America from his dad's old pictures, the man who could do no wrong in Howard's eyes, and was everything that Tony would never be, this one wasn't tangled up in what Rhodey always called Tony's self-hatred and daddy issues.
This wasn't even a crush on Captain America, star of stage, film, and theater of war — though Tony had delighted in the flush that spread across Steve's neck the night he surprised him with everything JARVIS could dig up from his starlet years. After a few days, Steve had finally accepted them as an embarrassing remnant of his past, and could laugh along with the references that Tony occasionally dropped.
No, this was a full fledged crush on Steve Rogers, the living, breathing, non-deified, man. The one who ripped off quick sketches of Disney movies that were almost as good as the celluloid frames themselves. The one who was a surprisingly decent hand in the kitchen, once he learned how to use the modern appliances — when Tony had voiced his surprise, Steve had scoffed and said, "who do you think cooked all those years? Bucky?" The one who always listened to Tony prattle on about his inventions, and even asked questions — even when Tony knew that most of his explanations must be going over his head — without getting frustrated and demanding that he dumb everything down.
God, it was worse than a crush, when he laid it all out like that. There might just be the smallest chance that he had fallen in love with Steve Rogers.
And now, Steve was back, studying hard for his High School Equivalency and College Entrance tests — now that the Army thing was out of the way, he wanted to go to college for art and history — and passed out on the couch amidst his prep books, sorely tempting Tony's resolve not to act on his feelings.
If only he had someone he could talk to about this! JARVIS and the other kids were no help; no matter how well he could teach them to emulate human emotion, romantic love was beyond them. Pepper had just given Tony a look that said, "you know what you have to do, so do it already," and then reminded him of the looming deadline for the new body armor prototypes he was designing for the military. And Rhodey had laughed in his face and said "saw that coming," which was utterly useless, because Tony hadn't seen it coming at all.
Maybe he could call Vicky, or Kenny, and get their advice. They'd be a little more sympathetic to his plight, right?
o
Steve had just finished his online test and logged out of the system, stretching out muscles that were sore from sitting in one place too long, when JARVIS interrupted him.
"Sir, you should see this."
"Go ahead, JARVIS," Steve answered easily. It was surprising how much he had missed JARVIS when he was away doing his army training. This time had been so different from the world that he knew that it didn't even register to him how differently Tony lived, compared to normal people. Even having a human butler was out of the norm, and Tony was about the only person on the planet with a robot one.
Or, not a robot, really, but an AI. Steve knew the difference, but still occasionally found himself making little slips like that, as if all the new information he'd absorbed in such a short period of time was a bit jumbled in his mind.
A screen popped up on Steve's laptop, showing what he recognized as a press conference. What startled him was the person standing in front of the podium; it was Agent Coulson. Steve had seen him briefly during his stint at SHIELD, but he'd also seen surveillance footage of SHIELD's numerous visits to Tony. TEACHR and JARVIS had allowed it, after his persuasive argument about knowing his enemy.
And if it gave him more understanding of the various ways that those people had hurt Tony, well, no one else needed to know about that motivation.
Now, Coulson stood in front of what Steve guessed was a substantial crowd, given the sheer number of microphones on the podium. The text on the bar at the bottom of the screen suddenly changed from "Mysterious Press Conference" to "Shocking News for All Americans" and Steve's gut began to churn.
"JARVIS, does Tony know about this?" he asked.
"Sir is watching in his lab with Colonel Rhodes," JARVIS replied easily. "They were testing a new version of the War Machine armor."
Knowing that it was alright to interrupt them, Steve gathered up his laptop and started maneuvering his way downstairs, even as Coulson began speaking.
"My fellow Americans," he said. Though he words were delivered calmly, Steve could see the hidden eagerness in his expression. Microexpressions, TEACHR had called them. Thanks to his serum-enhanced vision, Steve was very good at detecting them. "When I was a child, I was a huge fan of Captain America," Coulson continued. "Which, I'm sure, doesn't make me particularly unique. I'm sure thousands of you — maybe even millions — were too. I even collected the trading cards; I've got the complete set."
"What sets me apart from most of you is that I joined an organization — SHIELD — that had the resources and the inclination to actively search for Captain America. Ever since he crashed the Valkyrie into the Atlantic Ocean, determined to sacrifice himself to save all of New York City, Americans have been searching for him. From the Army, to the Navy, to SHIELD, where the search was led by Howard Stark; for several years no expense was spared in their searches. And yet, for some odd reason, all of those searches failed."
Steve reached the door to the lab, and JARVIS opened it for him without a word. Seeing the press conference playing on the large screen, and hearing it coming through the speakers, he quickly closed his laptop and hurried over to the others.
"Captain," Rhodey murmured as he approached. He was still sitting in the lower half of the armor, with the legs hooked up with all kinds of cables that Steve didn't understand. Clearly, they'd been interrupted in the middle of running their tests.
"Colonel," he murmured back. "Tony."
Tony gave a distracted wave, and Steve realized he was speaking in rapid fire whispers to someone through his headset; probably JARVIS or Pepper — or both — unless Steve missed his guess.
"Today, I have the pleasure of announcing to you," Coulson continued on the screen, "that those decades of searching have finally paid off. Late last year, SHIELD finally located the wreck of the Nazi plane Valkyrie, which Captain America had been trying to divert from its deadly course."
"SHIELD successfully dredged the bulk of the wreckage up from the seafloor, not daring to hope that we might finally get answers. And yet, answers — very waterlogged answers — we got. Today, it is my pleasure to announce that, a year ago to the day, we found the body of Captain America frozen in the icy remains of the Valkyrie."
His last words were all but inaudible, as the crowd noise swelled the moment he mentioned Steve's name. As the reporters shouted questions like crazy, Steve exchanged a glance with Rhodey. He wasn't sure what SHIELD's angle was, but he knew enough to know that they definitely had one. And furthermore, Steve now had enough experience to know that whatever that angle was, he probably wasn't going to like it.
Finally, the furor on the TV died down enough for Coulson to continue. "Now, some of you might be wondering specifically why I didn't say the remains of Captain America had been found. That is because, through some miracle, the process that Dr. Erskine and Howard Stark perfected to enhance Captain America made him capable of surviving cryostasis…"
Once again he was cut off by the surge of shouts from the crowd. It took almost twice as long before he was able to quiet the crowd this time around. "After careful monitoring, and consulting the notes of Dr. Erskine and Howard Stark, SHIELD was able to successfully revive Captain America near the end of last year."
"Now some people might be asking why you are just hearing about this now, a year after the fact," Coulson continued. "The reason is that, shortly after he was awakened, Captain America was taken from the protected and classified location by none other than Tony Stark. He was wearing his Iron Man armor, which he used to plow through SHIELD property and personnel."
That caused another stir amongst the reporters, and it didn't sound nearly as joyful as the last one.
"And now, the unthinkable has happened. It is my sad duty to report that last night, a very bad man named Loki came to New Mexico looking for a fight. He leveled a research compound there and escaped with several hostages. This is exactly the kind of situation that Captain America could have prevented, but Tony Stark has continued to deny SHIELD access to this national hero, just as he has refused to work with SHIELD in his Iron Man armor."
"So, today SHIELD is taking the unprecedented step of reaching out live, on national television, in the hopes of reaching Captain America, wherever he might be held — and we’re asking you to come to our country's aid once again. Just like in the 1940s, our country needs you. Thank you."
The reporters all began shouting again, but Coulson didn't answer. He simply backed away from the podium and walked to a waiting car, slipping into the back seat.
As the camera switched to the news anchors, Rhodey let out a sigh. "Well, that could have gone better."
"Or it could have gone a lot worse," Tony said. When Steve looked at him, he was smirking. It appeared that he was talking to them, and not whoever he had been on the phone with earlier. "K, pull up everything SHIELD's got on the New Mexico incident. J, did SHIELD actually try to contact us?"
"They attempted to hack into my systems through the same backdoor that they exploited before," JARVIS explained easily. "Since KOBOLD obtained their hacker's notes and we fixed that leak, they have not been able to get in again. They did not reach out through normal channels at all."
"You got that, Pep?" Tony asked, and Steve heard her quiet yes from his headset. "Rhodey-bear, does the Air Force know anything about this?" Tony focused on his friend.
"Not a word," Rhodey said disgustedly, holding up his phone. "I've been texting several of my bosses. No one below five stars has even heard of this New Mexico facility, and the Five-Stars aren't talking. No bases have gotten alerts to be on the lookout for this 'bad man,' including Holloman, Kirtland, and Canon, which are the bases actually in New Mexico."
"Text our friends at the National Guard — see if they've got any ideas," Tony directed him, "Steve, Dixon's on the line for you." He pulled a second headset from the pile of odds and ends on his table and tossed it to Steve.
As Steve tucked the headset around his ear, he heard Tony asking Pep to call SI's Naval contact. "Sir?"
"Rogers," Dixon greeted him shortly. He was clearly upset. "We haven't heard anything about this bad guy that Coulson mentioned. Do you have any clues at all, other than a generic desire to use your name and face for the publicity?"
"No Sir," Steve answered quickly. "There were no mentions of anything like that while I was at SHIELD. They were incredibly tight-lipped about everything while I was there, and I certainly never attended any debriefings or saw any dossiers on any kind of threat. Unless you count Tony, that is—"
That prompted laughter both from Dixon and the duo on either side of Steve. "And that particular dossier was mostly either outright falsehoods or presented in a very misleading fashion. Even if they had told me about this guy, I don't think we could trust anything they said about him."
"Which actually brings up another point," Tony said, speaking loud enough for Dixon to hear. "How do we know that this guy is actually bad? I mean, they did a very clever not so subtle stab at assassinating my character during that press conference. Whoever this guy is, I'm not exactly willing to leap to any conclusions about him."
"A fair point," Dixon agreed.
"The man is known as Loki, Sir," KOBOLD interrupted smoothly. "Footage of the incident last night has been sent to Miss Potts, Colonel Rhodes, and SI's top military contacts."
"Yep, I've got it," Dixon confirmed to Steve a moment later.
"Give us the cliffnotes version, K," Tony instructed.
"The tesseract that Hydra used to create their energy weapons during World War Two was salvaged by Howard in the process of looking for the Valkyrie. SHIELD has since used it to make similar weapons, and a Dr. Selvig has been studying the tesseract's relationship to space, believing it to be one end of a wormhole bridge. He was proven right last night when Loki of Asgard emerged."
"Hang on, isn't that Thor's brother? Weren't they in New Mexico a few months back?" Rhodey said.
"Yes Sir," KOBOLD replied. "This time he had an energy weapon staff of his own which not only fired blasts, but also apparently can hypnotize or brainwash people with a touch."
"Sir, comparing images of this Loki from last night to his first visit, I do believe that he is under some duress," JARVIS added. Two images flicked up on the display side by side.
Though the man was the same, in the first one he was healthy and smiling. In the second, he was sweating, with dark circles under his eyes and a grim smirk.
"Oh yeah, that dude's not thrilled to be here," Rhodey said.
"If this staff of his can hypnotize people…" Dixon suggested. Clearly JARVIS had passed the images on to him.
"Then it might be that someone used it on him first," Tony finished. "So, until proven otherwise, we treat him as dangerous but not necessarily in his right mind."
"The National Guard knows nothing," Rhodey suddenly piped up, reading off his phone. "Local police have already been in contact with them, and are also in the dark."
"Same with the Navy and Marines," Pepper's voice came through the speakers. "I think it goes without saying that the first that anyone heard of this outside of SHIELD was at the press conference."
"Which they only held because they couldn't get ahold of the Capsicle," Tony said. "Which begs the question…"
"Why me, and only me?" Steve said grimly. "Somehow I don't think I'll like the answer."
"Me neither," Rhodey agreed.
"Which is why I think we'll need to talk to a lot more people than we have," Tony said with a wicked smirk. "Pep, how fast can you arrange a press conference?"
"Do you really have to ask?" She shot back.
"Dixon, can you meet us at SI's LA headquarters in twenty minutes?" Tony asked.
"I'll leave right now," he agreed. "Rogers?"
"Colonel?" Steve replied.
"If given the choice, how involved do you want to be?"
This was a textbook example from his officer training, and Steve knew exactly how to respond. "If Loki attacks innocents then of course I'd try to stop him," he replied easily, "but surely the police, federal agents, national guard, and active-duty military are far better equipped to handle something like this."
"Good man. I'll see you in twenty," Dixon replied, then hung up.
"Might as well go get your uniforms on," Tony told them. "Get all gussied up. All your medals and everything."
Steve nodded and headed upstairs. Tony had a point; if he was going to reject the idea that Captain America was a superhero who would solve every problem, then he shouldn't wear the suit. His dress uniform was a far better choice.
o
They arrived at the press conference with five minutes to spare, setting down on the roof so as to avoid on-lookers. Steve desperately tried not to read anything into the fact that Tony had made a specially sized Iron Man armor coded to his DNA, just as he ignored Tony's lamenting that it wasn't quite ready yet, and that he objected strongly to Steve seeing it before the paint job was done.
Pepper started the press conference by announcing that, due to the number of accusations levied and the large amount of information to be presented, Tony would go in chronological order, and all questions must be held to the end. With that done, she introduced Steve, Rhodey, and the others, and made a point of mentioning that Steve was there of his own free will, which got quiet murmurs from the crowd.
After Pepper introduced them all, Tony did most of the talking, though the various Colonels, Generals, Commanders, and Admirals each had their say. Steve, like Rhodey, mostly stood flanking Tony, at Parade Rest. All three of them and Pepper had earpieces that connected them to JARVIS and Happy with Security.
Steve noticed Fury's spy, Romanova, lurking in the back of the crowd, and murmured her position into his earpiece. He was assured that Rhodey, JARVIS, and Happy were all keeping a close eye on her as well. As the press conference went on, she looked more and more annoyed; a fact that Steve took a perverse pleasure from. Shortly after her name was mentioned, she vanished from open view, but JARVIS continued to monitor her.
First Tony covered SHIELD's various sins that related to himself, covering the theft of Howard's notes and tech; the attempts to steal Tony's tech — especially the Iron Man suit — and data; the hacking into his home security system and subsequent breaking and entering; the mess that Romanova had left in SI's legal department; the withholding of medical knowledge; and the assessment where they rejected him from SHIELD, mockingly pointing out that if Coulson was disappointed that Tony wouldn't play with him, maybe he should talk to his own boss about why.
Then, Tony covered SHIELD's sins that related to Steve, which they had discussed on the flight over. Dixon chimed in after that, explaining that the Army had been working closely with Tony and Steve, and that no one involved was under duress or being held captive.
The final nail in SHIELD's coffin came when Tony revealed the before and after footage of Loki, comparing him to the other brainwashing victims. From what Tony could see, the reporters all drew the obvious conclusion as well.
Next came the various military brass and police officers, detailing how SHIELD had told them nothing about this apparent terrorist, and shaming Fury and Coulson for leaving them in the dark, even after Coulson's press conference had let the cat out of the bag. They were able to report that, thanks to the extra information that Tony had obtained, they were now coordinating across the country, and urged the various military and police forces across the world to do the same.
At the end, Tony retook the podium and announced a way for scientists of the world to contact him and each other, in the hopes of figuring out a way to track either the tesseract or the scepter. He mentioned a few names, but they didn't mean anything to Steve.
Once the speeches all finished, Pepper took center stage again and the crowd was finally allowed to ask questions. Just as Tony and Rhodey had predicted, the first one was directed at Steve, and it was almost the same thing that Dixon had asked.
"Don't you have a duty to serve your country and protect us from people like Loki?" the blonde woman asked.
And though he felt the need to elaborate slightly, Steve's response hadn't changed since Dixon asked. "The United States is not currently at war, Ma'am, and there is no draft. I've recently spent quite a bit of time studying our history, and I'm extremely clear on the difference between our military and that of other countries that feature a mandatory conscription. As there is currently no draft, nor mandatory term of active service, I — as a reservist member of the Army — will wait to see if my unit is activated."
"In the meantime, if I happen to encounter Loki, and I see that innocents are in danger, it would be my duty to protect them, but the Army frowns on its soldiers going off on a one-man crusade to hunt down criminals. Surely the police, federal agencies, national guard, and active-duty military are far better equipped to handle this incident than one private citizen such as myself."
That sent a flurry of whispers among the reporters. Next, Pepper called on a man that Steve had seen on the local news. "What do you intend to do with your time, then?"
"Long term, I intend to continue my education," Steve said easily. "Short term, I'll be focused on watching how the authorities handle the unfolding situation. I also have to say that I'm very disappointed that SHIELD has — intentionally or not — distracted from what I think is the important fact here, by making a big deal about my recovery."
"I sincerely hope that everyone will put aside their interest in me until a more appropriate time, and focus on tracking these alien devices, figuring out a way to reverse the brainwashing of Loki and the others, and stop whatever plan the person pulling the strings wants to enact. This is not a time for shiny distractions, or for vigilante actions by civilians. Nor is this a time for nationalism."
"In that video, Loki doesn't say that the goal was to crush America, but to subjugate the entire world. This isn't a time for posturing or partisanism, but for the entire world to come together as one, share information as needed, and protect our species and every other one on this planet. Not just from Loki, but from any other force that plans to step on us."
"Nice one," Tony murmured through his earpiece, and Steve had to fight not to blush at the praise.
The Marine Colonel whose name Steve hadn't caught stepped up to the podium. "This press conference was called predominantly to spread the relevant information about the potential threat that Loki — and more importantly, the scepter and tesseract — might pose to humanity. Mr. Stark and Captain Rogers have elected to clarify SHIELD's allegations related to themselves in an effort to keep people from being completely distracted by the narrative that SHIELD is trying to push."
"With that in mind, any questions for our officers before they get back to their important work?" Pepper asked sharply.
There were a couple about the planned military response, and the answers were all vague — so Loki wouldn't know what they were up to — but nonetheless reassuring. When no one else called anything out, Pepper dismissed the officers to get back to their planning.
Then she called for questions about the scientific collaboration, and got all of one. When Tony offered the same evasions "for security reasons," Steve saw several more disgruntled faces in the crowd.
Finally, Pepper wrapped it up by informing them that once the current crisis was over, there would be plenty of time for everyone to satisfy their curiosity. The reporters all shouted as Tony escorted her off the platform, but Steve ignored them as easily as the others as he and Rhodey fell into step behind them.
He knew he was making the right choice; both his own heart and all of his military and ethical studies were telling him so. Still, part of Steve was hoping that Loki was easily captured by the proper authorities. He knew that if more innocents were hurt, he would feel guilty, even if there was nothing he reasonably could have done.
o
"Sir, there has been an update on Loki," JARVIS said, interrupting their breakfast break. Tony had worked for several hours with scientists around the world to track Loki and the two devices. Now that the system was running independently, they were eating pizza while waiting for the results. Steve wouldn't normally approve of pizza for breakfast, but this was a special exception.
"What's up, J?" Tony asked quickly. Steve, Rhodey, and Pepper also perked up. They were running on very little sleep at this point, but there was nothing to be done about it.
A video was quickly projected from the table. It showed Loki in a large crowd, insisting that they kneel for him. "Likes to hear himself talk, doesn't he?" Steve murmured, taking in his self-aggrandizing body language.
As the people knelt, a handful of soldiers popped up from cover around the square. They fired over the kneeling crowd's heads, and familiar blue energy slammed into Loki. "Those are Hydra's energy weapons," Steve realized, sitting bolt upright.
"They were found after the war and kept locked up in a safe place," JARVIS informed him. "After seeing similar blasts coming from Loki's scepter, the German Chancellor authorized the military to use them and distributed them to strategic locations."
Loki was slowly getting up from the ground, when another round of blasts slammed him back down. Soldiers wove through the crowd, approaching him cautiously, but he didn't get up again. They quickly restrained him and hauled him towards a transport truck. As the doors closed, JARVIS paused, blowing up a frame that showed Loki's shocked and confused face.
"Well, score one for Team Brainwashed," Tony said. "I'd say that's the face of a guy just waking up to reality."
"Internal reports from the German military agree," KOBOLD said. Clearly he was keeping a deeper eye on things, Steve realized. "He is being compliant and quiet, for the most part.
Suddenly, a new clip flashed up onto the screen. It showed a bolt of lightning striking the ground of what appeared to be a German military base. A moment later, a man appeared where the blast had hit.
"Well, that's new," Rhodey said.
"SHIELD's files identify this as Thor, Loki's brother," JARVIS informed them.
"K, make sure that our German friends know that, ASAP," Tony ordered.
"Yes Sir," KOBOLD replied.
There was a tense standoff for several minutes between the German soldiers and Thor, but finally he lowered his battle hammer and the soldiers did the same with their energy guns.
"The Oberst — Colonel — has informed Thor of their suspicions that Loki was brainwashed, and their desire to help him," JARVIS quickly translated. "Prince Thor has expressed his gratitude and willingness to help."
"Well that's the biggest concern handled," Tony said. "Were the rest of his scooby gang with him?"
"SHIELD agent Barton was also apprehended in Germany," KOBOLD quickly told them. "He was knocked unconscious by the energy weapons, and they're waiting until he wakes to do further assessments. Loki had the scepter on him, but the tesseract and the other known brainwashing victims were not in Germany."
"At least the biggest threat is off the table," Steve said quickly.
"And the second biggest — without the scepter, I doubt they can brainwash anyone else to help them," Pepper added.
"Yeah, the tesseract has never been documented as having anything remotely like brainwashing powers," Tony agreed.
"So we're left with just a handful of people with normal weapons and human fighting ability?" Rhodey said. His fingers were flying across his phone, and Steve was sure he was in contact with the other military men.
"Maybe a medium sized group, if he's been wielding that scepter night and day," Tony allowed. "I doubt he'd have been able to make much of an army though, with all the traveling and all. And no one's reported a whole town going missing or anything."
While Tony had been doing his scientific thing, Rhodey, Steve, and Pepper had set up shop on the other side of the lab, keeping an eye on the news reports and following the preparations around the world. To Steve's pleased embarrassment, his words calling for global unity were repeated over and over, and translated into hundreds of languages.
JARVIS was able to translate everything for them, but he was also heavily involved in what Tony was working on. Shortly after they got started, Tony had booted up another AI named FRIDAY. She was very young, and designed to act as an assistant for SI, so she wasn't as advanced as JARVIS or KOBOLD. However, for the simple task of tracking and translating news sources and social media for the trio, she was easily able to keep up.
Her accent reminded Steve of the old neighborhood, and he tried to enjoy the memories, instead of feeling sorrow or guilt. Because they were keeping a close eye on things, they knew that there were no mass disappearances or reports of unusual behavior — something that several governments and militaries were also talking openly about tracking — that would indicate that Loki was building an army on Earth.
"Dr. Banner has suggested an adjustment to the calibrations," JARVIS said, drawing Tony's attention to a different screen. "With the large presence of gamma radiation now in Germany—"
"We'll swamp the system in that area, and either miss what's right under our nose, or skew the sensitivity settings so much that we can't find the second hotspot," Tony finished.
He immediately pushed his rolling chair towards his original workspace, slapping his freshly charged earpiece pack on. "Has — who've we got in Germany?"
"Dr. von Hoerner," JARVIS supplied.
"Yeah, has she gotten her hands on the scepter yet?"
Steve tuned out the rest of it, as he, Rhodey, and Pepper pushed away the remains of their own dinner on the big worktable and returned to their side of the lab.
"Now what?" Pepper asked quietly.
"Tony was right; the two biggest threats were Loki and the scepter," Steve said. "And it sounds like they've both been neutralized. I'll admit that I'm not thrilled to see the Hydra weapons survived to this day, but I can't argue with their tactics or results, and it looked like no innocents were harmed. FRIDAY?"
"The man that Loki was seeking out had hired extra bodyguards because of the news. Two of them are in serious condition, while he and the other two have much milder injuries — a broken arm is the worst of it," she promptly reported. "Some members of the crowd had bumps and bruises, and are being treated for shock and minor injuries as we speak."
Steve sighed in relief, and heard the others echo it. "It probably could have gone better, but it also could have gone a lot worse," Rhodey said.
FRIDAY continued her report, "JARVIS says that the intended target had access to something called Iridium, which helped the scientists narrow down their focus. They've already eliminated several areas, though we're still in a hot zone. With the Boss recalibrating the sensor array to ignore the white noise in Germany, JARVIS estimates that they'll be able to narrow it down to a handful of areas in a couple of hours."
Pepper gave them a weak smile. "That means this could all be over by tomorrow n— by tonight, rather."
"Dr. Thorne is hopeful that it will be," FRIDAY agreed.
"Good, then that means that you all need to get some rest," Pepper said, in her no nonsense tone.
Steve and Rhodey exchanged glances, but neither one was brave enough to disagree. In war, you slept when you could, so that you would be awake when it mattered. If they did get called to help, either as soldiers or as War Machine and Captain America, they would need to be at their best.
"As long as you promise to put Tony down for a nap once he's finished the recalibrations," Rhodey bargained.
"Deal," Pepper agreed, shaking his hand formally, though her smile was wide.
With that promise, and with one last glance at Tony, who was gesticulating as he argued with someone on the other side of the world, Steve let himself be herded over to the couches in the corner. He trusted Pepper — and JARVIS, KOBOLD and FRIDAY, for that matter — to keep an eye on things and wake him up when he was needed.
o
"Boss, you should come see this," his girl, FRIDAY, chirped in Tony's ear. He groggily swatted at the earpiece, before his brain finally figured out why he was hearing FRIDAY talking to him outside of a diagnostic program.
Sitting bolt upright, Tony looked around the lab. Rhodey and Steve were leaning over a table, talking to JARVIS, from the sound of it, while Pepper dozed on the other sofa.
"What's up, baby girl?" Tony asked, scrubbing his eyes with his hand. He'd probably gotten barely two or three hours of sleep, but it was looking like that was going to have to be enough.
"JARVIS got a hit on the tracking program, he and the others are coordinating with the scientists to narrow things down further, but Colonel Rhodes said he already knows where they're going. JARVIS is talking to the police and your military contacts," FRIDAY reported. "He also said that the Silencers will be finished manufacturing in about fifteen minutes."
If JARVIS was focusing on so many different things at once, Tony could see why he had delegated FRIDAY to rousing Tony. "Where're they headed?" Tony asked, stretching to get the kinks out of his back.
DUM-E rolled up and handed him a steaming mug of coffee, which Tony tentatively sniffed. "JARVIS told me to watch him. DUM-E didn't put anything inedible in the coffee this time," FRIDAY told him quickly. "And it looks like the group is heading for Stark Industries."
Tony froze, the cup halfway to his lips, "Say what now?"
"It's the arc reactor. JARVIS says they need—"
"A power source," Tony snapped his fingers. "How far out are they, baby girl?" He surged to his feet, chugging down the coffee and then grimacing. He was going to need to teach FRIDAY the difference between "edible" and "tastes good in combination" before he trusted her to watch over the Bots' cooking in the future. Orange juice was definitely edible, but should never be mixed with his coffee.
"About an hour," FRIDAY said as he approached the others.
Steve glanced up and smiled warmly at him. Tony ruthlessly suppressed the way his stomach flipped at the acknowledgement. This was definitely not the time to get distracted by a hopeless crush! "So they're coming for the reactor," he said, joining them at the table and taking in the screens at a glance.
JARVIS had one third of the display filled with the video calls to the various scientific teams he'd been consulting with all night, and they were all looking at a diagram that appeared to be a theoretical way to open a wormhole with the tesseract. Clearly someone had been busy while he napped.
Tony wasn't exactly an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics, but he'd picked up a good amount of it in the last twelve hours as the others digested and discussed Selvig's extraction theory notes, and it was enough to see that they'd figured out a way to stabilize the quantum tunnelling effect and break through the coulomb barrier.
The far third of the display was also full of video screens, and on these Tony recognized military uniforms, the local police chief, and several politicians he knew.
The final, center, third was the one that Steve and Rhodey were focused on, and it was a satellite map. Tony had spent weeks overflying the Stark Industry campus in LA, cleaning up after Stane's mess, not to instantly recognize it on the screen.
"So, they're coming for us?" he asked, stepping up to the holotable.
"We figured out that, with these advancements, they could achieve heavy ion fusion at any reactor with a high density power source," Dr. Kurkela greeted him.
"And they decided to go with SI's arc reactor?" Tony asked skeptically. "There's got to be easier places to break into."
"The Germans cracked the brainwashing on Barton," Rhodey told him. "As soon as he regained consciousness, he was himself again. There's still traces of the radiation in his brain, so they're taking everything he says with a grain of salt, but he said that he wanted to show you up, since you'd been such a thorn in Fury's side."
"So even brainwashed he was trying to kiss up to Fury," Tony snarked, even as JARVIS pulled up the report on Barton for him to read in a corner of the display.
"Since the New York project has been delayed, Sir, the reactor in Los Angeles is the only completed version large enough to create the power they need," JARVIS told him.
Tony quickly pushed aside the knowledge that he'd gotten so delayed on the Stark Tower by finding, teaching, and then most recently pining over Steve. "So, do we have any eyes on the ground to confirm that they're heading our way?" Tony asked instead.
JARVIS quickly overlaid the satellite map with a heat signature tracker, showing a group of dots roughly three or four miles from the area of the campus that housed Sector 16. They appeared to be clustered in an alley. This was then covered by a handful of images and short video feeds, showing different shots from traffic cams and similar sources. Among the faces shot in and around the black van, Tony recognized both the other SHIELD operative from the original surveillance footage and Dr. Selvig.
The view quickly switched back to the heat map, and now Tony could see the labeled dots that comprised the police, who had created a stealthy perimeter around the alley where the van was waiting.
"So what're they waiting for?" he mused.
"According to your new friends, they're waiting for noon," Rhodey said, nodding at the section of the display devoted to the scientists.
"Because of the variations in the magnetosphere, of course," Tony realized. "Which gives us…"
"A little under an hour, Boss," FRIDAY chimed in. "And the Silencers will be done in five minutes."
"Thanks, baby girl," Tony said absently, studying the images. After Stane had used it against him, he had gone back to the non-lethal sonic weaponry, and toyed around with adapting it to use with the suit. Because the suit had to be air-tight, it was also able to add sonic shielding, allowing him to use the Silencer without affecting himself.
He dimly recalled telling JARVIS to manufacture a couple prototypes last night. "What're our other friends saying?" he asked Rhodey.
"LAPD is willing to go knock down the doors on their van, but on the off chance that they've got more of those energy weapons…" Rhodey trailed off, and Tony nodded. He wouldn't want to face those things without the armor either. "The local National Guard are on standby, and the Navy's waiting out in the harbor. They wanted to know if you want to take them out now, or after they enter SI's property."
"They willing to let us take point?" Tony asked, mind whirling with possibilities.
"More than," Rhodey said. "JARVIS said you had a non-lethal way to incapacitate them that could be deployed on the suits?"
"Mm-hmm," Tony nodded. "You and I could go in right now — well, in five minutes — and have them all incapacitated in seconds. From what our German friends have found, they should be fairly easy to, uh…"
"Recalibrate," JARVIS said smoothly.
"Yeah, recalibrate, once they're in custody."
"I can coordinate with the LAPD's perimeter, just in case one of them gets past two you," Steve volunteered. "I've fought those energy weapons before, and I know how to deflect them with the shield."
"Good, yeah," Tony nodded. "Let's do it. Honeybear and I'll lead the charge, and you'll be our understudy."
Steve rolled his eyes at the theater joke, but a smile curled his lips.
"J, are those calibration changes we made to the new armor yesterday ready, or does Rhodey need to go back to the Mark III?"
"They should be ready, but they have not been tested against the sonic weaponry," JARVIS said.
"Mark III it is," Tony decided. The last thing he needed was for a flaw in Rhodey's suit to leave him susceptible to the Silencers, in case these guys were able to fight back. "Alright, let's get suited up."
o
In the end, it was fairly anticlimactic. All three men had suited up, and Pepper had given each of them a kiss on the cheek for luck, and then they'd joined the LAPD perimeter.
Once the officers had moved in closer from a discreet surveillance distance to an active backup distance, Tony and Rhodey had flown in and dropped a Silencer on the roof of the van. Within thirty seconds, JARVIS had reported that all hostiles were unconscious, or at least insensate.
They'd landed in the alley, ready for a fight, and found everyone out for the count. Each dot from the heat signature tracking was accounted for, and no one else crawled out of the woodwork to attack the clean up crew, so it appeared that the entire team was accounted for. They'd have to wait for confirmation from Germany to ensure that they hadn't missed anyone — apparently Thor had some way of making his brother talk — but it appeared that the job was done.
Selvig and the others were hauled off to a military medical facility that had the ability to both treat them and keep them restrained if needed. Within half an hour the alley was empty, and the trio were able to head back to the mansion without a single shot — or shield — being fired. They hadn't even had any energy weapons on them! Just regular guns.
Pepper and the Chief of Police held a joint press conference covering the basics, and telling the world that, combined with the German efforts, the threat appeared to have passed for now. There would be more to come tomorrow, she'd warned Tony, but he was off the hook for the rest of the day.
After the all night science binge and then the adrenaline rush of hyping himself up for a fight, Tony felt entirely let down by the actual "battle." Now, he was relaxing with Pepper, Steve, Rhodey, and everyone else who'd been involved and local, trying to stave off the inevitable energy crash. The only good thing to come of the day was the fact that he and Steve were now sharing a couch, watching the others mingle.
They were sitting slightly closer than was strictly necessary, which Tony had every intention of blaming on the alcohol. Not that he had drunk all that much; after he ended up not actually dying of palladium poisoning, he had had a long talk with Pepper, Rhodey and Vicky, about his destructive tendencies. And drowning himself in alcohol had been at the top of that list.
Of course, there were the practical benefits to cutting back, such as his desire not to do any more damage to his body than the palladium already had, but what had finally gotten through was when Vicky asked if he wanted to turn into Howard. Was that how he wanted his potential future kids to remember him?
That had hit him hard — especially given the way that Vicky and Will were being forced to watch Peggy going through Alzheimer's right now. So Tony had cut back, and kept his drinking to far more socially acceptable levels. But Steve didn't know that, and if he asked why Tony was sitting so close to him on the couch, he was fully prepared to blame it on the alcohol and deny, deny, deny.
So far, Steve hadn't asked.
Tony was trying very hard not to read anything into that, which was made even harder by the occasional smirks that Rhodey sent him from across the room. "We need to find Rhodey someone to date," he murmured at Steve, latching onto what he thought was a safe topic.
"Oh yeah? What's his type?" Steve asked.
"Despite what he acts like half the time — and what he says about me — he's a smart cookie," Tony confessed. "He wouldn't do well with someone who wasn't also pretty smart. Plus, he's pretty married to the Air Force, so a fellow officer would probably be for the best."
"Makes sense," Steve agreed, then hinted. "Though since DADT has been repealed, I can't use that as a yardstick to guess at his orientation…"
Tony gave in to the urge to facepalm. "I can't believe we've never brought that up. But no, my Rhodey-bear is one hundred percent straight. Well, maybe ninety-five percent. It's the Ryan Gosling-Reynolds exception."
"Goes without saying," Steve replied with a straight face. Damn but it was so much more fun when he understood Tony's references! That first month or so, living with the pop culture wasteland that was pre-TEACHR Cap, had been brutal! If Tony was trying to pick a fight, sure, using pop culture references on the uninformed would be a go to. But he wasn't actually trying to aggravate Steve!
"Well, unfortunately, most of my contacts are in the Army, and, well, dead," Steve deadpanned, "so I don't think I can be much help with this plan."
Tony snorted, but he wasn't wrong. Feeling incredibly brave — a combination of their heady win over SHIELD, the little bit of alcoholic courage, and the fact that Steve hadn't pushed him away yet — Tony adopted his best, most casual tone. This was one hundred percent not the reason he had initiated this conversation, but with the opening presenting itself, he couldn't resist getting a little intel. "So, what about you then? If we can't conspire to set up Rhodey-bear, how about setting you up with someone?"
Steve froze for a long moment, then quickly gathered himself and began breathing normally again. But now Tony could see a pink blush sweeping across the back of his neck. That was a very interesting reaction.
"Anyone catch your eye amongst that Army crowd you hung out with for half the year?" Tony prodded. "No more DADT means that you wouldn't have to worry about that either."
"No, no one in the Army caught my eye," Steve said very carefully. "Honestly, aside from the occasional global catastrophe, I think I'll probably retire from the Army, and the superhero business in general."
"Really?" Tony hadn't expected that. Sure, this version of Cap wasn't exactly the Star Spangled, All American, gung ho version that his dad had always talked about, but a love of the Army and being a soldier was baked into the legend of Captain America. That's what all the trading cards and comic books and old timey movies had said.
Which, as soon as he thought it, Tony realized was a logical fallacy. He knew that Steve had joined the Army because that's the branch that had drafted Bucky. He knew that Steve had gone to war only because America was at war and he thought it was his duty to fight the Nazis. In an America that wasn't at war, and with Bucky long since dead, what did Steve really have to fight against?
He'd said it himself, more than once over the past few days: he was willing to do as much as the next soldier, but he wasn't interested in going out and fighting a one man war against all takers. He'd even volunteered to stay with the backup, today, and other than one joke about saving something for the rest of them, hadn't expressed any disappointment about missing out on the action.
Not for the first time, Tony reminded himself that the picture of Steve that Howard had painted was wrong, and he needed to stop relying on it as his default. The man sitting beside him was Steve, his friend, and not Captain America, Howard's hero.
"You going to retire, then?" Tony asked casually, hoping that Steve wouldn't realize he was still fishing for information.
Steve chuckled. "Well, in light of my unique situation, Dixon offered to let me retire with full benefits, as though I had already put in my 20 years, if I promised not to request back pay for the last sixty-six and a half years that I was technically declared MIA."
Tony couldn't help but laugh at that. "That sounds like Dixon, alright."
"I also promised that if we went back to war — a just war — I'd consider returning to active duty." That made sense to Tony; Steve had been incredibly upset at some of the reasons that America had gone to war in the past, and it had definitely knocked off the rose tinted glasses he had viewed their government with.
Hell, if word of that caveat got around, it might actually make the Generals and Presidents second guess going to war in the future. Unless you could prove to Steve's satisfaction that the war was justified, he wouldn't support it, and if you tried to drag America into a war that Captain America himself didn't believe in? Well, you might as well pack your bags now, because it wouldn't be long before the voters were showing you the door.
Before Tony could come up with a suitable reply that didn't sound too patronizing, Steve sighed and leaned back further into the couch. Because of his bulk, Tony ended up tilting slightly towards him, and he found their sides touching from shoulder to knee.
Tony did his best not to tense, but after a moment without Steve seeming to realize what had happened, he relaxed. He did his best to keep his expression neutral, but for all he knew, Steve could read him like a book with those serum-enhanced super eyes.
"So, what about you?" Steve asked before Tony could come up with a new topic.
"What about me, what?"
"Anyone you have your eye on?" Steve asked casually — as casually as when they'd been talking about himself and Rhodey. There was absolutely no reason to read anything into his question, Tony forcibly reminded himself.
"I mean, it's tough enough to find someone willing to look past my media personality, and the idea of the public scrutiny, and my tendency to go on three day engineering binges," Tony found himself admitting. "But when you add Iron Man into the mix, well… Pepper was probably my best shot at that, and she's already said she can't deal with watching me go into battle. And since I'm not willing to give up the suit…"
Steve nodded, and was Tony imagining it, or had his head come to rest a little closer to Tony's shoulder? "I get it. It sounds like you'd be better off finding someone who is already in the spotlight themselves, who'd understand about all those things. Or someone in the military, who wouldn't ask you to give up a part of yourself."
"It sounds like you're trying to set me up with one of those strutting Brass peacocks, like Dixon," Tony's mouth replied without his brain's conscious thought, as he was stuck on Steve's last words. Pepper had always talked about Iron Man like it was a separate person from Tony himself. Steve's simple assertion that it was a part of himself was the most acceptance Tony had gotten since before Afghanistan.
Barely daring to hope, telling himself he could still blame it on the alcohol, Tony shifted so that his head fell sideways, into Steve's shoulder. Instead of Steve pushing Tony away, however, he simply laid his own head on top of Tony's.
Firmly telling himself not to hyperventilate, Tony attempted to memorize every second of how this felt, knowing that he might not get another chance.
"If not Dixon, how about someone else with military experience, who's also going to be in the public eye a lot?" Steve said.
Tony had to search around for a moment to realize what he was talking about, and then his breath caught. Steve couldn't possibly be suggesting what Tony thought he was suggesting? Could he?
"That sounds like a pretty tall order," Tony said softly. "I don't suppose you know anyone who could fill it?"
"Oh, I can think of someone," Steve murmured, his breath hot against Tony's ear.
"Yeah," Tony tilted his head up to look at Steve, realizing too late that Steve had shifted too, and now their faces were inches apart. Their noses bumped together gently, and then Steve gave him a small, tentative kiss.
Tony was so surprised he didn't respond right away, but as Steve started to pull away, he lunged forward. Steve's lips were firm, and warm — Tony had long ago learned that super soldiers ran hot — and the kisses were gentle yet purposeful.
Steve's hand slid around to the small of Tony's back, pulling him closer, and Tony let his hand rest on Steve's thigh as they continued to kiss.
It took him several minutes to realize that the tone around them had changed, but it wasn't until JARVIS said "Congratulations, Sir," in his ear, that Tony really paid attention.
Drawing back from the kiss, Tony left his hand on Steve's leg and looked around, bemused. Every eye was on them, and everyone was laughing, cheering, and applauding.
"It's about damn time!" Rhodey shouted above the din, a giant grin on his face.
A brightly smiling Happy let off piercing wolf whistles, and Pepper beamed at them, applauding softly.
"Excellent choice, Boss," FRIDAY chirped in Tony's ear. Even the kids had to give their two cents! Tony would be annoyed, or maybe proud, if he wasn't so damned happy right now.
"Well, that's not exactly how I planned to tell the others," Steve murmured in his ear. "But I guess they'd have figured it out sooner or later."
Tony laughed in relief. If all this attention hadn't dimmed Steve's affections, maybe he could handle the press of being partners with the Tony Stark. And he was right about having his own public image — if the reporters at the press conference yesterday hadn't frightened him off, then he could handle himself in the future.
They would need to deal with Fury and the rest of SHIELD tomorrow, and probably need to weigh in on the Loki and Thor situation, and he knew that Steve was going to want to talk to someone in Germany about those Hydra weapons, but Tony shoved all that out of his mind until tomorrow.
He was excellent at compartmentalizing, and right now he wanted to focus on Steve, and those wonderful kisses. And the way that Steve was nuzzling his neck right now, oh god.
"Get a room!" Rhodey called.
"Well, I might point out that this is, in fact, my room," Tony snarked back, "seeing as how this is my house. But I think I'll leave the hosting duties to you, Sugarplum!"
With that, he stood up, grabbed Steve's hand, and began to drag him off toward his bedroom. He'd spent a year thinking he could never have this, and Tony would be damned if he'd let something like guests stop him now. "J, make sure everyone gets out of here or finds a safe place to crash for the night, yeah?" Tony said, as Steve willingly trailed behind him, chuckling.
"Of course, Sir," JARVIS immediately replied.
"And if Pep wants to meet with me tomorrow, make her wait until after noon, at least," he added.
"Of course, Sir," JARVIS repeated, as FRIDAY giggled.
"Oh, and FRI's still a kid, enable parental controls on the bedroom, J," Tony added. He'd long since become immune to the knowledge that JARVIS watched his bedroom activities, but that was totally different than his baby girl seeing what they got up to.
"Yes Sir," JARVIS said, tone amused, a moment before Steve pressed Tony up against the hallway wall. They were out of sight and hearing of the crowd now, and he nuzzled Tony's neck again.
"Better enable those on the hallway too, JARVIS," Steve murmured huskily, his deeper voice shooting straight to Tony's dick. "I'm not sure I can wait all the way till the bedroom."
And as he bit down on a particularly sensitive spot on Tony's neck, Tony thought that was an excellent idea. Beds were highly overrated anyway.