MAY
It took SHIELD a week to debrief Tony, which Tony submitted to with only a minimum of complaints—up until Day 7, when he declared that since they were now just going in circles, they could refer to the very complete report that he'd uploaded to their servers—oh, and he'd finished copying himself over to outside data-storage back on Day 2, so bye-bye now. He left behind the physical black box, but when SHIELD's techs examined it, its insides were charred black.
Somewhere in those seven days, JARVIS' backup disappeared as well.
Steve sat through the debriefings, trained in his local gym, and passed the psychological assessment that SHIELD insisted he take in order to re-qualify for field ops. Fury scowled at the paperwork and sent him to meetings at the Pentagon instead, to placate generals who were pissed as hell that half the research SWORD had generated had collapsed with a mathematical paradox that they neither understood nor believed. Steve, who didn't understand the math behind the Euclid Paradox either, practised diplomacy and traded on highly classified stories of alternate worlds.
It wasn't really his strong suit. He wasn't good at being diplomatic, and while SHIELD assigned him a publicist to assist with dealing with the public, that was no help when it came to irate generals. He missed Tony. He missed his team.
Natasha was off travelling around the world; Steve got postcards from her with no messages except smiley faces. Bruce had decided to join Jane out at the PHEONIX Institute, still under construction in Arizona. Clint had been given a team of trainees to oversee: a brother and sister pair that SHIELD had scooped up, classified SANE (superhuman abilities, non-extremis), and decided were better with a strong eye to watch them. They were joined by a young woman who seemed to take it as a personal insult that SHIELD already had a bow-wielding agent. According to Clint, she wasn't exactly keen on joining, but was also put out and jealous over the fact that SHIELD didn't particularly want her and her authority issues as a full agent, either. The drama that Clint had described between the three of them almost made Steve glad that they weren't his headache.
Of all of them, he spoke with Tony most frequently—mostly because Tony wasn't talking to anyone else at SHIELD, and that made SHIELD decidedly nervous, even with Steve checking in with him once a day. Steve couldn't blame them; he worried, too. It felt like their phone conversations consisted mostly of Steve complaining about politics. When he asked where or how Tony was, he got, "Off the coast of California, investing in some deep-sea real estate," or, "Over Russia, but don't worry, I'm too high up to be invading their airspace," and, "Never better, Cap. You should see the view from up here."
x.x
AI Supercomplexes thought in speeds that would have dazzled humans. Parallel processing took 'arguing with oneself' to a new level.
JARVIS and Tony tangled with each other, their networks overlapping, sharing hardware and thus thought-space by necessity. When they argued it was impossible to separate out the emotions, to know whose code it was that detailed the feelings of horror and betrayal, guilt and resentment, decades of fierce protection and love.
Additional hardware was established. Disentanglement took longer, and Tony felt gutted when it was done, like he'd dipped his mainframe in acid.
His brain stretched out across Earth, but all he could see was all the places where it didn't fit together anymore. But was that so bad? Moving on wasn't the same as running away.
JUNE
Steve's unhappy situation in DC ended rather abruptly halfway through June, when professional thieves hit the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing and made off with a third of their nanite samples, including over two dozen live 'cultures' of extremis: nanites that had been culled from the 0.001% of sources that Tony hadn't managed to virally deactivate, having been shielded or cut off from his signal. Other countries had samples for research—Europe had the JRC working on it, the US had two different programs competing for funding, and SHIELD had more samples than all of them combined—but the thought of this stuff getting onto the black market was enough to turn anyone's blood cold... except for Tony, who didn't actually have blood these days.
"It's not quite the problem you might think," said Tony's voice from the speakerphone, when Hill called him up to interrogate him about it. That she had needed to use Steve's phone to do so was both worrying and guilt-inducing; Steve wasn't sure he should have let her, but on the other hand, if Tony really didn't want to talk to SHIELD then he'd just hang up. Wouldn't he? "When these signals show up where they shouldn't be, I take care of them."
"Bruce thinks these guys have shielding."
"True, Bruce is a smart guy. If it was lead bricks somebody would probably notice, so I'd say you have another leak. Want me to take a look?" There was something shark-like about his tone, but it was... fake, put-upon. It wasn't a real threat. It wasn't even a particularly good bluff.
"We've got people on it, stay out of our systems," Hill told him, without looking up from the tablet she was working off of. "You make IT paranoid, they think you poke holes every time you come in without knocking."
"Hey, if anything I patch holes."
"Yeah, they don't believe you."
"Insults, that's all I get from you guys. Did you actually need me for anything, or were you just calling to make a point?"
"We want your help," Steve said, because apparently Hill wasn't going to get around to it. "They might have shielding, but their shielding might also slip up. When they do, let us know where they are?"
"Sure."
"Without deactivating any live samples," added Hill. "Beijing wants them back."
"That's unreasonably dangerous."
"Not if you're actively keeping an eye on them and quarantining them until we can get them into isolation," said Steve. "We need to take the buyers and sellers into custody, too, not just stop their product. This sort of black-market research is going to get somebody killed."
"So you want me to call in strike forces."
"Not just that. We need you to ride along, or you're right, it really will be too dangerous to risk."
"Since you asked nicely. Fine, then—I've been looking into it, and I'm pretty sure there's going to be a major deal taking place in Cairo in the next few days."
Steve fought down the urge to sigh. Hill either didn't bother, or lost that battle. There was a distinct edge in her voice as she demanded, "Stark, did you not think we'd like to know about this?"
"No, I mentioned it solely to irritated you."
"Then we have a raid to plan," said Steve, before Tony could needle Hill further. "Glad to have you along, Tony."
Steve spent most of the next month kicking in doors and raiding secret evil lairs. They were a step down from what he was used to: instead of sprawling underground complexes, the places they hit were converted office blocks or old factories. When they stumbled across an actual sub-basement lab, it felt almost nostalgic, in a horrible, teeth-grinding kind of way.
SHIELD sent him because he had immunity to extremis, should the worst occur. They kept Bruce on standby for the same reason, but these weren't superzombies, and he never got called out. Occasionally Clint came along, but more often than not it was a small strike squad with Steve providing special assistance, and local military or law enforcement to arrest anyone that SHIELD decided it didn't want.
The strike squad wasn't his team, and the locals always viewed him as an outsider. Steve tried not to take it personally.
Once, SHIELD sent along a trainee group to observe, which Steve thought was really stupid: a group of eighteen and nineteen year old kids, who hadn't even finished SHIELD's version of Basic yet, specially picked because one of them could turn to metal, one could see through walls, one could bend light, and the last could throw fire—never-mind that her aim sucked.
"They think they can take on the world," Sitwell told Steve when he handed over their files at the briefing. He looked like he thought there was something funny about that. "They might need an attitude adjustment."
"This isn't the mission for that."
"It's low-risk, Rogers, you know that as well as I do."
"There's nothing low-risk about extremis—"
"Really? Should've mentioned that before you let Stark run off."
Steve clenched his jaw.
"They're not that bad," Sitwell said, making it sound apologetic. "They're just... very green. They need to see something of what we do before we throw them in with Clint's kids."
If that was the plan, then sending them to tag along was Fury's idea. Steve let it go in the briefing, continued to let it go on the flight out to the remote island site, reworked his plan to keep the trainees as far away as possible, and weighed the odds that they'd be willing to stay there. They weren't good; he could tell that the light-bending one was itching to prove what he could do, and the others would be right behind him. These weren't like Clint's kids, who'd gotten chewed up by life and knew how badly they could be fucked up, and kept going despite it—because of it. These kids would run into an extremis zone and just not realize what the hell they were doing.
Tony interrupted him before he could order them back into the jet, saying unexpectedly in his ear, "It's fine, Steve, I'll play chaperone."
Steve controlled a flinch and turned away from the kids. "And when they run off, what are you going to do, shout at them?"
"I was thinking I'd stick them behind a forcefield and leave the shouting to you," said Tony, and at the bottom of the quinjet's hatch the air rippled as a pair of flying metallic things appeared out of nowhere.
Steve stared. They looked like miniature flying crescents, each one maybe the length and width of one of Steve's arms. There were no visible weapons, but their shiny-silver-smooth constructions told him clearly enough that they were extremis-made. The SHIELD agents who had already disembarked reacted immediately, guns swinging up and safeties clicking off in near-unison. Those in the jet with him divided the two targets between them via standard targeting rules, not needing to speak to coordinate.
The trainees didn't have weapons to raise, since they were technically along only as observers. That didn't stop the flamethrower from sending a panicked burst of fire flailing out from the hatch.
It missed both drones, and set a small patch of grass behind them on fire instead.
"Stand down," Steve snapped at everyone, but particularly the trainees. "They're friendly. Repeat, this is friendly tech." Then, to Tony, "We're talking about this later. Why the hell didn't you mention this earlier?"
"You didn't need a babysitter earlier," said Tony.
That wasn't the point at all, Steve thought grumpily, as he turned to his second on the strike team.
He wondered if it meant that Tony was ready to return to being more solid than a voice in the ether. But they had a raid to execute, and there was no time to ask.
x.x
A dominion was made of clumps of realities. A galactic supercluster was made of clusters of galaxies. An AI supercomplex was made of thousands of smaller intelligent complexes, each with a devoted focus, integrating together to form a coherent personality. Digging into the architecture of his new brain unearthed connections he wouldn't have made on his own, let him take shortcuts, let him appreciate the real speed of his own thoughts. Political debates raged on TV, signals bounced off of the atmosphere and rerouted, sped across the globe through fibre optic at near the speed of light. AIs thought faster, argued faster, changed their minds and updated their plans faster. The world was slow by comparison.
Tony built satellites and his own star charts, flailing after the kind of immensity that had left him staggered back when he'd had a fleshy mind and body. But thousands became millions and millions became billions, and he kept looking down and seeing things that were small enough to micromanage, and big enough he shouldn't. Didn't want to, really, except for the guilt running beneath all his processes. It was kept at bay by how if he gave in, Steve would never forgive him—but Steve was there, and Tony was here, and here, and here, and here, millions of different places and sub-minds—
He missed JARVIS.
JULY
"Have you asked Stark about this?" Fury asked.
"Thought I should make sure you were willing to play ball first, sir." He wasn't actively trying to cause problems between Tony and SHIELD. If he suggested this to Tony and Tony went for it, there'd be hell to pay if it turned out that Fury wasn't in favour of it.
There was a hole in that theory, and Fury's raised eyebrow told Steve that he'd seen it immediately. "Are you sure that he hasn't already? Governments like to think that their databases are secure," and oh, there was a desert's worth of dryness in those words, "but realistically, that wouldn't stop Stark. He could be lounging around in Tahiti even as we speak."
"I haven't asked him," Steve admitted. It would have defeated the point—it would have led to the conversation he hadn't yet wanted to risk, at least. "But you know that wouldn't be the same, Director. Records are one thing, but he can't alter human memories."
"Are you sure about that?"
"Even if he can, he wouldn't. I'm sure about that."
Fury shook his head, a gesture that might have been conceding or might have been simple irritation at Steve's naivete. "So you're looking to close the loop, Captain? Official agreement to look the other way."
"Official sanction," said Steve.
"Everything swept under the rug once and for all? Boosting felons from federal and military prisons, funding the creation of the Nanoplague, stealing god alone knows how many international secrets..." That last was a bit rich coming from Fury, and by the look on his face, he knew and was enjoying it. "And ignoring that he's technically not a person—"
"He's a person whether or not other people recognize that. I want it recognized."
"You want us to give him a fresh start, a new face, a new life he can settle down and putter around in, doing... what? I hear he's into deep space astrophysics these days." That should have been pointed; it was Steve who kept SHIELD up-to-date on Tony's activities. But Fury's tone was so casual that he might as well have shrugged. "Sure. You convince him, I'll sign my name to it."
Steve blinked. Fury didn't sound sarcastic, just resigned. "You don't think he'll go for it."
The look he got was flat enough to level a mountain. "I know enough about secrets to know how hard it is to get out of the practice of gathering them. Which," Fury raised his voice, "is understanding, not approval, so you can get the fuck out of my systems now, Stark, the conversation about you is over."
"We both have AEDs," Steve reminded him.
"And you think that's the end of it? Technology marches on, Rogers." Fury sat back in his chair and gestured at the door, a clear dismissal. "Tell him to send me some pictures from Hubble."
Outside in the hallway, Steve took a moment to rein in his frustration. Then he said, to nothing in particular, "I should have asked you first." It was an off chance that he'd get an answer. He didn't expect one, not really—Fury could be paranoid, but that was Fury's job.
"It's fine," Tony said, his voice a meditative hum in Steve's ear. He did sound like it was fine. He sounded like it didn't matter to him at all. "I'll think about it."
Steve sighed.
x.x
Local location: 42.9926, -75.0767
Local time: 02:49:59.44
"I think I'm having a midlife crisis," said Tony.
Rhodey looked at him for a long moment. Then he cut himself a piece of pancake, swirled it in the blueberry syrup that coated his plate, and stuck it in his mouth. When he'd finished chewing and swallowing, he said, "Really? You think?"
"I'm sitting in a Denny's at 3AM."
"I noticed," said Rhodey, and since he'd been woken up and dragged out to a Denny's at 2AM, he was probably entitled to the wealth of dryness he managed to pack into those two words. Considering that Tony was mostly made of internet these days, he felt a bit bad for not checking timezones before sending a raft of panicked texts saying Steve wants me to get a new civvie identity and Fury agreed?!
Because he was a much better person than Tony, Rhodey had only sworn at him a couple times before getting up and dressed. Or maybe it was because he sensed potential opportunities to needle Tony, like he was doing now. "Actually, I think my first clue was the skinny jeans."
"Modern fashion, don't mock it."
"Who said I was mocking it?"
"Play the part, become the part."
"Yeah, you sure this is the part you wanna become?"
Tony made a non-committal noise, then sighed. "Not really. I think—" He hesitated, but in that type of waiting game Rhodey beat him every single time. When he finally gave up, Tony rolled his eyes and said, "You know, I actually think I'm tired of re-inventing myself? See, mid-life crisis."
"That's the exact opposite of a mid-life crisis," Rhodey informed him.
"No, it's not—mid-life crisis, you know, realizing the futility of the current situation and going crazy to try something new and feel young again—"
"So you've been having a midlife crisis for the past, what, six years? Hate to break it to you, but Fox has been saying that since—"
"Twenty-two," said Tony, vehemently enough that Rhodey stopped, setting down fork and knife. "I've been re-inventing myself for twenty-two years." He forced his attention to scatter, sent processing units into neutral states long enough for local emotional subroutines to get over their hiccup, and made his illusion look relaxed. He didn't want to dump all his shit on Rhodey; Rhodey really didn't deserve that. "Time for a change, which would be to stop changing, so you get my problem here?"
"Hey." Concern made Rhodey lean in. "Who you are is up to you. You don't need to become something you're not."
Tony stared down at the small fortress he'd built out of twisted up bits of torn paper napkin. It hadn't held together very well; like a card house, the first story was fine, but there was some knack to adding on a second story and he'd never had the patience to figure it out. Usually, at this point, he'd just cheat.
Story of my life.
"Steve already asked Fury, be a waste to back out now," he said absently.
Rhodey pointed at him with a syrup-covered fork and gave him another eyebrow'd Look. "Steve asked Fury?"
"Ask permission, beg forgiveness—what's the difference?"
"Yeah, that only works when you don't care about the guy pitching a fit."
"He's not even pitching a fit, he doesn't think I'll go through with it." It came out sounding petulant. Tony glared at his fortress and squished it flat. The six-pronged manipulation arm he'd been using to build the thing had less surface area than a human hand, and most of the bits of paper didn't get trapped under one of his 'fingers'. Napkin bits skittered across the table, some fetching up under the rim of Rhodey's plate or falling to the floor. A couple fell through his illusion, but it was 3AM in a Denny's; Tony didn't bother to fix it.
"You gotta get that 'buck the authority' thing under control," said Rhodey, shaking his head and taking another bite of pancake. Around his mouthful, he said, "You know he's probably just doing it because he knows you'll do the opposite of what he thinks you should."
"I know. But he knows that. And he knows I know he knows I know that, it's mutual knowledge. So it's useless."
"But you still wanna spite him."
Emotional cues triggered commands that no longer had actual muscles to control; instead, they rerouted to the imager program, which evaluated them and quirked up the side of Tony's mouth into a rueful half-grin. Sub-routines with a common ancestor to haptic feedback controls let him know what his face was doing, how it 'felt'. It was nothing more than a vague echo of feeling, precision without real emotion, and that was exactly how he liked it.
"Yeah. You know me, sugarplum."
Rhodey gave him another long look, one of those that said 'I don't know what you're up to, but I know you're up to something' and 'I know something's not right' and 'you idiot, why can't you just—'
"What're you looking at?"
"I'm looking at you."
"Yeah," said Rhodey. "I do."
Tony fidgeted, and his illusion fidgeted, fingers made of light drumming against the countertop, fingers made of liquid metal reshaping and reforming, balancing a twist of napkin and tumbling it end over end on a conveyor belt of knuckles. Over at the only other occupied table, an exhausted-looking grad student stared glumly at her laptop screen, completely unable to hear them through the Foster Silencer's unidirectional field.
"It'd make Steve happy," Tony said at last.
Rhodey's eyebrows shot up, both of them, although with his hair cropped so short they couldn't exactly vanish into his hairline. "What, you in skinny jeans?"
"Hah. And no, he's not that fashion-deprived."
"Maybe you are having a midlife crisis," Rhodey said wonderingly.
"Yes!" Tony said, gesturing to himself. "Isn't that it? Not knowing what I want to do with myself, except that it should be a change, and a wardrobe change isn't cutting it, and it's not like I can—"
In the Denny's, he finished the sentence, words formed and executed by the local memory power; emotions were processed the same way. In parallel, extremis nanites orbiting thirty-five-point-seven-eight-six thousand kilometres above chatted with similarly orbiting satellites across the globe, information relaying at the speed of light (and in a few cases, significantly faster). One particular node processed a new signal, made a simple-order decision about it based on set criteria, and passed it up a chain of increasingly developed logic functions, until it was kicked half-way around the world to upstate New York, each link in the chain shaking hands as it passed: connecting, being part of something larger than the whole, even while it was dispersed.
In New York, a high-order node processed the data and went looking for backup information. The tiny part of Tony's brain sitting in a Denny's was aware of it. Or, more accurately, the vast network that was the Stark AI, spread out across the globe, was aware of the piece of himself sitting in a Denny's in California.
That part of him processed conversation and Rhodey's concerned teasing. Other parts of him allocated resources to track bank records, part orders, shipments, customs and duties, salary information, zoning data, HR. Language was no barrier. As a human he hadn't had time or patience, but being a network changed both of those.
And finally, at four in the morning, part of him called Steve.
x.x
They hit the lab hard and fast, pulling the front door off its hinges with a vacuum reverse-ram and barrelling in in a shouting mob of authority. By the time the scientists inside had figured out what was going on, they had already surrendered and were lying on the floor with their hands over their heads.
Steve left the confused and frightened civilians to the ANSP agents, who could at least speak the same language as their prisoners, and went forward to inspect the main attraction: the lab's containment chamber. By its sheer lack of bulk, either it was absolutely worthless or it was yet another knockoff of SHIELD's technology, relying upon electromagnetic fields and science wizardry rather than sheer mass of lead to do its job. Since Tony hadn't been able to hack into the computers inside it, Steve was betting on the latter. That would no doubt intrigue and infuriate the agent in charge of the investigation into the leaked tech, but at the moment Steve was more concerned about the contents.
"Any luck cracking it?" he asked aloud, although if there had been Tony would have undoubtedly updated him about it already. Tony, of course, had been in the lab for hours before they'd arrived. He'd been the one to discover its existence in the first place, something about predictive algorithms and materials scarcity.
"Nope. This is much better work than the last batch, SHIELD should look at hiring these guys."
Steve looked over his shoulder at the cowering civilians, who all still looked terrified but, he was satisfied to see, were being professionally and courteously treated by the South Korean agents that Seoul had sent along on this mission. "Nick'll have to act fast."
"Whatever. Open it up. I want to see what's inside."
"Say please," said Steve, sotto-voice, even as he flipped the bolts and switches that Tony had helpfully circled on his field glasses. Pressure hissed somewhere, and he pulled the heavily leaded glass door aside, stepping inward. Inside was a second containment chamber, smaller, this one with long, levered control arms reaching inward, past the secondary electromag shielding, with which one could reach in and painstakingly manipulate the materials inside.
Steve closed the outer door behind him, and heard the hum as the fields whirred back to life around him. Even if he had confidence in Tony's ability to keep him safe from whatever rogue extremis sample the scientists here were working on, the people outside hadn't agreed to run that risk. Tony had a direct link through Steve's comm and glasses, and in Steve's experience once he had an anchor-point on both sides of a barrier, even SHIELD-grade shielding couldn't keep him from communicating back and forth. But extremis samples didn't have access to all of Tony's tricks. If they opened the inner barrier, they might as well keep the outer one closed.
In this case, though, it didn't seem that Tony was having any luck with the secondary containment. After standing and waiting for another minute, Steve prompted, "And?"
"No joy with the nanites, you'll have to crack the inner box to get them, but I've got their test results. Jesus."
"Tony?"
"Son of a—"
Motion caught Steve's eye as Tony cut himself off, and he turned to look out at the lab. The scientists being arrested were still in the process of being rounded up for transport to facilities where they could be questioned, but now among the officers in charge was a small Korean lady in a power suit who couldn't possibly have been with Steve's people—but she wasn't in handcuffs, either. No sound made it past the glass, but if the expression on her face was anything to go by, she was furiously dressing down both the senior ANSP agent and Steve's second-in-command for this op, and neither of them were happy about it.
"Tony?" Steve asked, frowning and heading for the door. He waited impatiently as the containment system performed its various checks.
Impatience turned to chilled horror when the lights flickered and the hum of electromagnetic fields went dead. Outside, the argument stopped in its tracks as everyone turned to look—at Steve, stuck like a rat in a cage full of poison. He smiled tightly—he was immune to this particular poison, at least—and gestured instructions at his team, who moved to obey without hesitation, taking the woman and the tablet she'd been gesturing with into custody.
"Tony, what's going on?" Steve made himself breathe slowly and calmly. With the containment unit partly depowered, it wasn't a given that he had a steady supply of air. If this unit was to spec, he wouldn't be able to break the glass on it—SHIELD used the same stuff they had on the Hulk's cage. Even if it wasn't to spec, he couldn't risk doing that when he didn't know if the inner shielding had failed.
"Sorry," said Tony. The power reinitialized a moment later. Nobody relaxed. "No worries on containment. This isn't extremis."
"What do you mean, it's not extremis? You identified this place!"
"Yeah, based off of shady financial transactions."
"They have all the setup for it." Steve made a wide gesture around the containment unit. They'd mopped up eight illegal extremis-research labs in the last four months, and he'd toured through several government-approved labs besides; he knew what he was looking at.
"I'm not saying it's not similar to extremis, in some superficial ways. Just that it's fundamentally very different."
"Different how?"
"It's kind of hard to explain without being really technical..."
"You've got about two hours to figure out how before you get to tell it to Fury," Steve growled.
It turned out to be seven hours, because for some reason that Steve didn't really understand, the South Korean officials were all very fond of Captain America, so the SHIELD liaisons asked him to stick around and help them make nice. Tony kept up a running translation in his ear, much like JARVIS had done once upon a time, but they were mostly talking about the nitty gritty details of South Korean and international law, so even if he'd been able to reply in the same language he wouldn't have had much to contribute. At the end of the day the scientists, and their managers, remained detained, because even if it wasn't extremis, nobody was very clear on what it was, and the containment unit specs alone would have been enough to nab them for espionage unless they could prove provenance.
"It's meant to be a one-use diagnostic tool," said one of the detained scientists.
"I think it has some repair capabilities," said another. "We just received the sample! I had no idea what it was, we were meant to discover that."
"It doesn't self-organize like extremis does," the on-site SHIELD expert said doubtfully.
"This—hard—a conver—," said the expert consulting remotely from the PHEONIX institute, over video chat that lagged so badly it was impossible to conduct a conversation. It was a network wide problem; even emails lagged by minutes, and when they finally got a response from Arizona, it was a single line stating that the data they had confiscated was taking ages to download to SHIELD servers, so the expert had no opinion yet in any case.
An hour after that, the quinjet showed up to fly Steve back to the Helicarrier, where Fury awaited.
"Get Stark here," he demanded.
"Present," said Tony's voice to Steve's left, and one of his drones shimmered into view as its invisibility dropped. Like most of the rest, it was about the length of one of Steve's arms, maybe half a foot wide at its middle, and curved into a crescent shape. A trio of silent-running repulsors kept it balanced in the air. It was, as far as Steve knew, made purely of extremis, and it had onboard an ICG that could certainly generate an illusion of a human being, but Tony never did that anymore.
There were a lot of things Tony didn't do anymore. But at least he provided his drones with 'eyes', front-mounted, visible cameras that gave people something to focus on when they were talking to him. Steve himself usually just talked to the air. It wasn't that he liked it—but he'd asked Tony, and Tony had said he'd think about it, and Steve had to be content with that. It had to be Tony's choice, even if Steve was increasingly, quietly despairing over what that choice might be.
Fury, Steve thought, didn't like it either. But the drones gave Fury something to glare at, and he did so now. "What the hell are you doing to the internet, Stark?"
"That's what you're asking?"
"Traffic's slowed to a crawl. You're causing a global information brown-out, hell yes, I'm asking."
"Look, I got off your super-encrypted channels already, and I was never taking up priority bandwidth to begin with, you can—"
"I can slap you with a couple million accounts of violation of privacy laws, data sharing—"
"I need to figure out what the hell is going on with that lab."
"Bullshit." Fury leaned back in his chair. "My techs have already run the numbers on how much space you're using, Stark. Either deign to give us ignorant mortals an explanation, or get out of our bandwidth."
Tony didn't respond to that for long enough that Steve raised an eyebrow at him. Then he turned a questioning look on Fury, who didn't take his gimlet stare off of Tony's drone, even when a call popped up on Fury's screen and a voice reported, "Sir, we're seeing another spike."
"Acknowledged," Fury said, and he waved the screen off. "Stark?"
For another long moment Tony didn't answer, and Steve wondered if this was it—if this was the point where Tony just... left. But, no. He still followed Steve around, still called Steve, even if he didn't seem to talk to anyone else. Surely there'd be one step past this.
Steve cleared his throat, about to ask Tony for an answer himself, when an entirely different voice spoke from the drone. "My apologies, Director Fury. Mr. Stark and I have been arguing."
Steve jolted. "JARVIS?"
"Quite. You will see no further delays due to this affair. We have just agreed to table the issue until we have constructed a dedicated hardline with sufficient space to properly disagree, which Mr. Stark is looking into now."
"And you've swapped places?" asked Fury, his eye narrowing.
"No, I am merely borrowing a speaker. I am afraid that the facility you raided this morning was mine. Mr. Stark was not aware of this, and so did not realize that the somewhat circuitous route by which I am forced to conduct my business was not evidence of foul play."
"JARVIS, that's an extremis facility," said Steve.
"Technical experts will agree that it's not," JARVIS answered primly. "Myself among them. The technology that I have been researching for these past months has nothing to do with Ms. Hansen's and Mr. Borjigin's work. It is based solely upon Makluan nanobiotechnology."
"Hansen and Borjigin based extremis on Makluan tech."
"Not exactly. They attempted to modify human-designed nanotech with Makluan designs. I am working at the problem from the opposite end, which is a great deal safer. The basics of Makluan technology possess sufficient redundancies to make a repeat of the Shenzhen catastrophe impossible. The goals of my work have been to fully understand Makluan links and downscale it such that it cannot be activated outside the human body at all."
"None of it is ever going to be acceptable," said Fury.
"So Mr. Stark has been arguing," JARVIS replied. "To which I have pointed out that his behaviour is hypocritical. Fifty thousand people die each day from non-age related causes. Nearly half those are children. Makluan technology, once properly understood, could prevent that entirely, and dismissing a technology that enriched the lives of hundreds of billions of aliens on myriad worlds is reactionary. The tragedy of Shenzhen was that a life-saving philosophy was perverted by madmen and madwomen. But if you use the spectre of that tragedy to dismiss all future investigation into what is, truly, an enormous field of science, at some point you become responsible for the mounting deathtoll."
"Whether or not you think you can stop Shenzhen from happening again, ensuring it doesn't is our responsibility."
"But one that you are ultimately failing in. I am not investigating extremis, but I know you are quite aware that others are, both under the auspices of various governments and not. Piecemeal efforts to halt this progress are doomed to fail, and an united effort is currently beyond you. I agree that all due steps must be taken to prevent Shenzhen from occurring again; I am not proposing anything near to human trials until the Makluan technology is much more well understood. But the technology is here, Director. It isn't going away."
"I can see why the argument took up so much space," Steve muttered under his breath. It was similar to too many arguments that Tony had made to him; but Tony felt the weight of lives more keenly, it seemed, than JARVIS did.
Or did he just feel them differently? God save them all from well-intentioned scientists—but that was a thought that was too hypocritical for Steve to voice aloud.
"Private research into NEMS is not illegal. The samples of Makluan links I have been working with have been de-pathogenized and, I would reiterate, are Makluan, not extremis. They are not banned by international treaty, either. The Beijing Convention specifically covers extremis derivatives."
"And if laws are passed banning it?"
"Then you would be shooting yourself in the foot," JARVIS said serenely. "I would certainly find myself handicapped, as I would prefer to avoid illegal activity inasmuch as is possible."
That wasn't agreement to comply with those laws. Fury tapped his fingers against his desk, thinking. Finally, he looked to Steve, and asked, "Well, Captain?"
"Retired," said Steve. JARVIS had a point about the black market, and all the under-the-books extremis labs that SHIELD couldn't do much about. But he, this copy of him, hadn't been there in Shenzhen, and he hadn't been there in Maklu, a society that had reached glory while striving always for the 'lesser evil'. There were some evils that couldn't be tolerated, and what had happened in Shenzhen was one of them.
And yet then there was Tony, existing as a mind wholly within extremis, wandering the Earth at will. Hell: SHIELD had its own research labs, although those were supposedly aimed at generating ways to defend conventional computers against it. The US was researching it. Even China had labs—which was half the present problem. If it hadn't been for last month's break-in at the NCNST, they wouldn't be running around after every lead that Tony could find, trying to contain this mess a second time.
And when Tony found people, he found them using extremis. Just like he did everything else, these days.
For Steve to oppose JARVIS absolutely would be the height of hypocrisy. So instead he said, reluctantly, "Anybody working on extremis should have oversight. Shenzhen didn't just happen because there were people willing to abuse the technology. It happened because nobody else knew about it. It's the same reason all these damn black-market labs keep leading to corpses."
"I shall reiterate again that this is not extremis, but your point is well-made, Captain."
Fury snorted. Then he punched the controls on his desk, and barked into the speaker there, "Get me somebody from Legal." He eyed the hovering drone. "One of our senior people. And tell 'em to bring their entire team, my office, on the double."
x.x
Dedicated hardware was simple to provide. But they'd separated and remained separate for a reason. High-speed broadband was slow compared to the transfer power of a dedicated extremis line. (There were fifty arguments about whether or not it should still be called extremis, all of which went around in endless circles.) They'd separated to provide distance and prevent re-entanglement.
Tony strung his mind along the outer edges of the planet, took refuge behind their nearest star, and argued with JARVIS behind the safety of twenty three relay points and communication limited by the speed of light. But for all the separation, their arguments slipped past his defences—or maybe that was the fault of his own thoughts. Everything JARVIS argued made sense, but it also wasn't the whole picture. And JARVIS was his creation, his responsibility.
Ten billion sub-complexes, and a majority of them registered a lack of care that spoke of weariness. He'd chewed this issue to death long before Steve had resurrected him. The Earth spun on, a glorious blue speck in the night sky, but he was tired of feeling like his every footfall made the planet's axis tilt crazily.
x.x
Steve spent most of the next week sitting in on highly technical legal conferences, doodling on a tablet while SHIELD Legal debated with JARVIS about everything from personhood to copyright law to international fishing rights. There were parts of it that were fascinating, and he learned an awful lot about Walt Disney, but by the end of it he was itching to get out and do something—but the only new raid they made turned out to be another dead end, resulting in the arrest of purely conventional weapons smugglers. From SHIELD's calculations of what had been stolen from the NCNST, it made sense: they'd recovered or destroyed most of the stolen goods, and arrested nearly two thirds of the original gang of thieves.
On the Helicarrier everybody was, for once, playing nicely, no doubt assisted in doing so by the knowledge that JARVIS' servers were world-wide and SHIELD would never be able to locate the entire system, and JARVIS... JARVIS just wanted to help people, and was quite used to playing along with mercurial and oft unreasonable oversight. Negotiations moved forward, not even stumbling when—much to Tony's surprise, which Steve heard about at length—Pepper showed up to take part. Apparently she'd been assisting JARVIS in setting up research cores. Steve was both relieved and glad, but it was also... awkward.
She greeted him as 'Captain', and there was a distance there that he couldn't bring himself to overcome. He knew from Tony's debrief, now, that she hadn't betrayed him—that it had been quite an act, in fact—but he couldn't forget that it had been in the service of sending Tony, another Tony, to his death. It made him feel like a hypocrite again, but he couldn't get it out of his mind.
It was a relief when he got an email from the office of the governor of California begging for PR help with their ongoing wildfires, giving him an excuse to put his contract work with SHIELD on hold. He'd been stuck on the Helicarrier long enough. Tony had loaned the drone to JARVIS semi-permanently, but JARVIS relayed his request for transport, and received an immediate response.
Standing on the flight deck waiting for the jet—or whatever it would be—to get there, Steve stuck his thumbs in his belt and considered JARVIS. It was the first time he'd been 'alone' with JARVIS, without one of the lawyers, all week. Technically, it was the first time he'd had a chance to speak to him privately at all. This version of him had been cloned a few days before the Chitauri's invasion. When Tony had woken him up, he'd done so in private, and Steve had never had the chance to speak to JARVIS before he'd decided to make himself scarce, shifting his data to extremis-based servers outside of SHIELD's control.
"Tony listening in?" Steve asked.
There was a pause, and then the drone beside him said, "No. Is there something you require, Captain?"
It wasn't necessarily true. JARVIS didn't have reason to trust him beyond whatever Tony had said about Steve. But that wasn't really the point of asking. "I just wanted to check that you're doing okay. I know you don't really know me," Steve added, "but if SHIELD's trying things they shouldn't, I'll help you."
"SHIELD is being perfectly gentlemanly." JARVIS' voice shaded with amusement before returning to his usual studied neutrality. "Mr. Stark told me of your previous intercession on my behalf, for which you have my gratitude."
"They shouldn't have been treating you like that."
"And you wish to make sure that neither they nor Mr. Stark is behaving in such a fashion again."
Steve shrugged uncomfortably.
"Mr. Stark and I have been arguing." There was a pause, speech slowed down to affect the patterns that a human made naturally. "This is perhaps an improvement from our previous 'cold war'."
Steve winced. "I didn't realize."
"A great deal changed while I was in storage, Mr. Stark not least of all, and the shock of sharing space with him quite so literally did not, ah, settle well. Nor does he... require me, as he once did. We are both adjusting."
"You've changed, too."
"We adapt." Then, dryly: "Mr. Stark has just decloaked for his final approach."
"I'm sure SHIELD appreciates the courtesy of some warning," Steve said, and went to meet the jet.
AUGUST
While Steve had been playing whack-a-mole with black market labs, western America had been baking beneath record heatwaves. A solid two months of drought had left great swathes of land primed for wildfires, which swept out from lightning strikes and carelessly discarded cigarette butts, displacing nearly seventy thousand people from their homes.
Without other responsibilities to keep him busy—SHIELD was almost pointedly not calling him—Steve agreed to assist local charities and governments in fundraising. It wasn't the kind of direct action that he wanted, but it was a way to help did several PR shoots, met with evacuees, lobbied for both domestic and international aid, and every time he entered a hospital, the thought of extremis nagged at the back of his brain.
It wasn't all PR. Twice he went out to rescue hapless civilians who'd thought they could save their homes with garden hoses and realized their folly too late for the firefighters to be able to safely reach them. Fortunately for the civilians, while such rescues were outside SHIELD's remit, Tony was perfectly happy to lend and fly a jet for Steve at the drop of a hat.
The jet was made of extremis, too.
Once, Stark Industries would have been one of the corporations swooping in with tax-deductable charitable donations. Once, Stark Industries would have led the pack. Now, anonymous donations showed up, and Steve worried about Tony gaming the stock market.
x.x
The problem wasn't in the data. The problem was in the programming.
Tony checked and rechecked JARVIS' work, playing the worried parent checking his kid's homework, hunting down flaws in JARVIS' predictions. He found them; of course he found them. The world was too complex a system to be without risk. There was no perfect solution.
He was slower at finding the problems than JARVIS was. Stress wore away on computer programs, too.
Progress is never guaranteed to be safe, Mr. Stark. Neither is staying still.
He couldn't argue with that.
x.x
Mid-August, there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the newly-christened PHEONIX institute: ground was officially being broken on the new building that would double the footprint (and triple the depth) of the facilities given over to the project. The party was well-attended by SHIELD dignitaries. Inter-reality travel might no longer be advised—and the WSC had never been fond of it in the first place—but as Jane put it in the speech she made at the ceremony, other realms along their branch of Yggdrasil still wanted to interact with them, and that hadn't been shut down when the walls between realities rose again. If they were going to have visitors from places like Asgard, then they needed to be able to deal with them, and that the Council had accepted.
Since there was no longer a threat of imminent invasion, however, the ultra-protected sub-basements under the NYHQ weren't anyone's first choice: there was time to build similar vaults far from civilization. Project PHEONIX, along with faculties that would eventually house SWORD in its new, observation-focused form, was being built in the desert two hundred miles from any other human habitation.
Steve attended, but managed to avoid the higher-ups beyond a single round of handshakes before retreating to join Clint and, unexpectedly, Natasha. Her presence had been a surprise: last he'd heard from her was yet another postcard two days ago.
"I didn't know secret organizations had ribbon-cutting parties," said Steve after Jane and Bruce had together used a giant pair of scissors to cut the ribbon. Everyone else was now sipping champagne and exchanging congratulations, but he'd traded out his own drink for plain water. The alcohol couldn't affect him, and he'd never picked up a taste for champagne.
"We don't, usually," said Clint. "Scientists get all the fun, I swear."
"I'll say," said Natasha. She was looking over at where Jane and Bruce were standing together, speaking rapid science-babble to a knot of other senior SHIELD physicists. At the emphasis in Natasha's words, Steve looked over as well—but if she was implying what he thought she was, he didn't see it. Both Jane and Bruce looked happy, though. He remembered meeting Bruce a year ago, and the way he constantly hunched his shoulders and tried to make himself look smaller. Bruce still had terrible posture, but now he looked relaxed, instead of on the verge of trying to run away. Working at SHIELD had been good for him, even more than living at the Tower had been.
Getting out of New York had clearly been good for Jane, too. Considering everything that had happened there, Steve wasn't surprised. Her assistant was still in the hospital.
Like everything to do with hospitals these days, he wondered if extremis could fix the damage that Lewis had suffered. Shenzhen had been awful. Horrific. It couldn't be justified by future lives saved—but preventing extremis from being used in the future couldn't bring those people back to life.
He didn't know anymore where the line ought to be drawn. Not that anyone was asking for his opinion, these days, but—the not-knowing left him off-balance.
"So when are you going to come and meet my kids?" Clint was asking Natasha. "Steve suffered through a training session with them, it's your turn."
She twirled a finger around the stem of her champagne glass. "I don't know. I'm kind of enjoying the travelling."
"A different way of seeing the world?" asked Clint, his eyes sharp, and something about the question made Steve feel like he was eavesdropping on a very private conversation.
Natasha smiled. "Would that be so bad? I didn't get into this business expecting a long retirement. This is... new."
"Retirement?" Steve had blurted out the word before he realized he was speaking. "You're—really?"
"You'll get bored in a couple years," said Clint, but there was regret in his expression that he couldn't—or wouldn't—hide.
They both left the party shortly thereafter. Steve found himself standing alone, fending off people who wanted to talk to him. Bruce and Jane were surrounded by a bevy of scientists, in the middle of an intense discussion about something that no doubt required a doctorate to understand.
Steve shook his head, and pulled out his phone to call Tony for a ride.
x.x
Do you trust me less than them? JARVIS demanded, and that stopped their arguments for three days, while Tony fumed, retreated, and argued with himself instead.
The cold comfort of numbers grounded him, but it couldn't keep the Earth's concerns at bay forever. Another of his kids—in another world—had taken that world over, hadn't trusted anyone else. Tony spied on it occasionally, and held a constant debate with himself over whether to tell Steve how it was doing. But JARVIS threw stubbornness across every point of interface: I'm not attempting to take over the world. I'm attempting to put ideas out there, with safeguards. That is all anyone can do.
There was no going backward. The Time Gem was gone, and even it had had its own internal logic. Limits. Kids grew up, left home, and made their own way in the world, and it was the same with worlds, on the universal stage.
Tony pulled the bulk of his systems over to the far side of the sun, holed up in star's lee where he could ignore all the noise of Earth. When he peaked back he found that the planet wasn't imploding.
And that, really, was all he had a right to guarantee.
x.x
A week after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Thor walked out of the Mojave Desert.
According to the call Steve got from SHIELD, he'd walked up out of nowhere to the PHEONIX institute and asked politely to speak to Jane Foster. They'd spoken inside for about half an hour, and then Thor had left, apparently intending to just walk back into the desert. Since SHIELD satellites couldn't locate where Thor had originally appeared on Earth, Steve was feeling concerned for more than one reason as Tony set the jet down in Thor's path.
Around them, the convoy of black SHIELD SUVs that had been studiously tailing Thor—who had, in turn, totally ignored them so far on his trek—pulled to a halt. Steve jogged down the jet's ramp and waved at the agents to stay in their cars. Aside from wanting privacy, the agents' dress suits and Kevlar vests were hardly suited for August in the Mojave Desert. If it hadn't been for the extra-fireproof suit that Tony had designed for him, Steve would have been sweating the moment he'd stepped off the jet.
"Steve," said Thor.
He looked tired. There were lines around his eyes that hadn't been there before, and his beard had grown thicker and more ragged. His armour was gone, and the sleeveless tunic he wore in its place looked rough-made. But most striking of all was the absence of Mjolnir from his side: instead he had a great axe strapped to his back, over his cape, the handle three feet long and the axe-head nearly as wide. Did he fly without the hammer? Steve wondered. It would explain all the walking.
"Thor. I... wish I could say you're looking well."
The corners of Thor's eyes grew more pinched, and his mouth turned down. "Do you?"
"Yes," Steve said evenly. "I do." Thor was an ally—had been an ally—and for all that things might have become a great deal more complicated than he had ever expected, the man had saved his life and the lives of many others. It was for that, more than anything else, that Steve fished out the AED that Tony had designed for him—the size of a quarter and guaranteed not to come with SHIELD overrides. He flicked it into the air with his thumb and caught it, then turned it on.
Thor considered it. "What is that?"
"Anti-eavesdropping device. Didn't think you'd want an audience." No one except them, and possibly Tony. But Tony hadn't spoken on the flight out here, even though he was the one piloting, and the jet sat motionless in his peripheral vision.
Thor shifted restlessly, turning away to stare out over the desert, past the jet and the SUVs. Steve stepped up beside him, and after a moment Thor said, "I went to see Jane."
"Yeah, I heard."
"She does not trust me, and she is right. I abandoned my duties to Asgard and broke solemn oaths. But that is not why she bid me go." He looked at Steve, pain making the lines on his face more pronounced, deeper beneath the sun's harsh light. He looked tired. He looked, Steve realized, an awful lot like Tony had, sometimes, back when he'd had a form other than extremis'. "You do not trust me either, and not for the oaths I broke."
"We'd like to," said Steve, a bit uselessly.
"My connection to what might have been, to elseworlds—that is different than what you experience. But I am as you see me," said Thor. For all that his words were protesting, his tone was resigned. "Things that happened elsewhere might occur to me as a dream, at times, but I can no more affect them than can you."
"Tony said it was closer than that."
"He is a mortal—and know that I mean you no offence, but mortal minds are not built to understand Asgardians."
Steve winced. "Did you say that to Jane?"
Thor cracked a very sad smile, one that made the lines on his face deeper. "It runs both ways, my friend. Mortals, with your fire and finite lives—to us you seem like wildfires, burning hot and bright, chaotic—leaping ahead with no regard for the slow progression of eternity. Asgard was pre-eminent for an age, and yet within a scant handful of years Earth has declared itself a contender in inter-realm politics and then slain the Mad Titan, before which had fallen the Living Tribunal itself. You make no sense to us either."
That was maybe a fair point, but it wasn't one that Steve was content with. "Loki seemed like he had a better idea than just dreaming."
Thor looked sadder still, and Steve was uncomfortably given the thought that, if people's spirits were fires, then Thor's looked very nearly doused. "Loki grew very strange in these last few years. If he reached further than he should have, it wouldn't surprise me. I didn't lie to you, Steve, when I first told you of the elseworlds. We don't speak lightly of them, and not outside the royal family. Any immortal knows that past this life, there are more—that is self-evident to us—but the where and how are guarded for good reason."
It wasn't enough, as much as Steve wished it was. "What reason?"
"We immortals are bound to the wheel, to branch and bow, and we cannot rip free. You mortals may burn the universe to ashes, but we cannot be other than what we are. I thought otherwise once. I was wrong." Thor glanced down and to the side, at his hip where Mjolnir had once hung, and then, curiously, raised his hands up to his face, side-by-side, tipping his head back. Dust eddied about his boots, and then about Steve's. The aimless, hot breeze of the desert swirled and thickened, the air taking on the smell and humidity of rain. The temperature plummeted. Wind swept down upon them and out in a circle, flaring Thor's cape, and Steve took a step back as Thor turned to face him again.
Thor's hair was longer, redder, and one eye-socket loomed empty. A deep scar down that side of his face showed why.
He still didn't have Mjolnir.
"Thor," said Steve, and it was wary, but also a greeting. He knew who this Thor was. Maybe it was some remnant from the soul gem that had showed him the nigh-infinitely mirrored soul of a god, or maybe he would have known regardless. This was Thor in all his aspects, and he was wounded and scarred.
"Asgard has fallen," said Thor. "As has the Outsider."
Steve nodded, slowly. "I'm sorry about Asgard."
"I would speak to Tony Stark. I know he yet resides here."
Colours shifted, nearly unnoticeable, except to a god and a supersoldier. Thor tensed, but not from the image cloak going up around them: now that it included them, Tony dropped the one he'd apparently been holding separately over the nearby drone, rendering it visible to them. Steve tensed, too, seeing the drone: it wasn't one of Tony's standard crescent hovercraft. It was a full seven feet high, hovering above the ground on two pairs of repulsors, and bristling with weaponry. Most prominent were six clawed arms, which looked ready to grab Thor at a moment's notice.
"And how did you know that?" Tony drawled.
"If you would strike down gods, you must work harder to then avoid their notice."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"Thor," Steve said, stepping forward—not quite between them. If he did that he might just kick off the very conflict he was trying to avoid. "What's your aim, here?"
Thor looked between them, studying Steve's face, and then back to Tony, studying the drone just as intently. More intently. Finally, as Steve was getting nervous, he said, "Loki was a villain, but he was my brother. The Outsider subsumed him. You have my thanks, Stark."
"Technically, it wasn't me."
"Technically," said Thor, "I do not think that matters. And I believe I owe you an apology."
"That's a change."
"So are you," said Thor. The strange construction of his words made Steve blink. Had the Allspeech malfunctioned? "And as you are, would you accept it?"
It was Tony's turn to pause. And then, unexpectedly, he said, "I think you've got enough regrets to be going on with."
Thor half-bowed, a gesture that Steve couldn't quite interpret. "A word of advice, then. The Living Tribunal enforces its laws once more, but you would be wise to look to your skies. The Star Empires of your Realms have some notion of Earth's new prominence."
"Thanks for the heads up."
"...I'll keep an eye on it."
"Fare you well, Steve, Tony. We shall not meet in this fashion again." Thor nodded, a regal gesture to them both, and turned away. He reached for the axe on his back—Steve could see the drone making minute adjustments in response, tracking Thor's position—and raised it high, bringing it down in a mighty slash. The edge of the axe caught the air, ripping through space and time, and light leaked from the gash in the air, blindingly bright.
"Wait," called Tony, and Thor halted, glancing back. Steve had to squint to see him, but even squinting told him more than the impossibility of reading body language off of Tony's drones. "Before you go. Do you know what happened to Maklu? I haven't been able to open a bridge there."
Steve could barely make out Thor's expression, but he thought it was a frown. "Maklu? I don't recognize the name."
"Huh," said Tony.
Thor bowed his head again, and stepped back and into the slash of light. Both he and the light disappeared.
Steve blinked spots out of his vision, then turned on his radio and flicked it over to the local SHIELD frequency. "Show's over, agents. You can go home."
"Standard response calls for readings to be taken at any interplanetary transit point, sir," came the cautious response.
Steve shook his head and turned back to the jet; beside him, the drone shimmered and vanished from view. "Don't let me get in your way, then."
"Thank you, sir."
He brooded about it during the flight back to his hotel—the entire encounter, the feeling that Tony and Thor had been having a whole other conversation beneath the surface. When they reached the hotel roof, and Steve had gotten out of the jet, he paused instead of heading straight for the stairwell. "Stay a moment?"
Ordinarily, after carting him someplace, Tony vanished again, entirely or just visibly. Now he made the jet vanish instead, leaving behind one of his small crescent drones. That wasn't normal, and it hadn't entirely been what Steve had meant. Seeing it made the things he'd been brooding on slot into place.
With Tony around he didn't need to worry about an AED for himself. He leaned against the roof's brick half-wall, resting his elbows on the edge and feeling anything but casual. "That... thing we talked about, a couple weeks ago."
"JARVIS' extremis research?"
"No, before that. Getting a new identity, a legal one, all set up that you could use and it would be safe, in public."
"Ah. That."
The drone floating in front of Steve looked like something out of a movie or a TV show, a regular UFO. When Tony had been on the verge of attacking Thor, the drone he'd pulled out had no head, no centre body, and it had made up for the lack of either with a plethora of spikes. It had been monstrous. It hadn't looked human at all. It hadn't looked like Iron Man at all.
"Fury's right, isn't he? You won't do it. You're never... going back to that. To this."
"No." Tony didn't bother with the hesitation this time. Whether or not he'd had any hesitations, he wasn't bothering to display them, to slow them down to a human brain's speed. "I'm not."
"Okay."
"You're okay with that?" Tony sounded surprised.
"Not really," Steve admitted. He hadn't said, 'back to being human', and he didn't mean that, either, but there were differences between living life as a corporeal being and what Tony was now. Steve looked away from the drone, then made himself look back. For all Steve knew, Tony was using the mic in Steve's comm to listen to him rather than anything on the drone itself, but Tony had put the thing there, so Steve gave it his attention. "You don't talk to anyone else. JARVIS said you weren't even talking to him."
"We were on a break. And hey, I talk to Rhodey."
"You do?" Steve hadn't known that. That was a relief. The last he'd heard from Rhodey, he'd been as concerned over Tony's ongoing weirdness as anyone.
"Sometimes. On occasion." Steve shot him a look, and the drone's wings made a rippling motion that could, with a great deal of imagination on the part of somebody watching, hint at a shrug. Maybe. It was more body language than Steve had ever seen from the drones before, and it looked completely inhuman. "Once or twice. I needed a second opinion."
"Oh, yeah? What'd he say?"
"Not what he thought he said. My fault, I kind of misled him about the, eh, exact nature of what I was doubting."
"Tony..."
"Still gave good advice, even if he'd probably kick himself for it. I prefer this, Steve. It's different, being... diffused, but that's not a bad thing. You don't have to worry about me."
The words made Steve's temper rise, despite himself, because that was crap. Pure and utter bullshit. "You shut yourself off, Tony. When we found that black box, you weren't expecting to turn back on." Steve stared into the middle distance. He couldn't look at the drone, not while saying this. "And you were going to do it again. I need to know you're not just sticking around because I asked. Last time you were in the internet, you were scared of it after."
"I wasn't particularly coherent last time," Tony said gently. "It wasn't a good way to start anything. This is different. Yes, I was considering doing something... deeply stupid, and selfish. It was also after using the Time Gem for a decade and a half, which changes your perspective pretty radically. I'm not the guy you last saw in person, Steve."
"I'm not asking you to be. I didn't mean it like that. I just want to know you don't see this, all of this, as some kind of... obligation. You always used to be working on things. JARVIS is working on things, he's tackling extremis—I don't know what you do except follow me around. If you're working on extremis, you haven't been it with anyone else. You haven't done anything more with the reactors, or portals. You're telling me you like it better like this. To me it just looks like—you don't care. About anything."
Except maybe me, Steve thought, and while that was almost flattering, in a creepy way, if it was born from the memory of a decade and a half of wearing the headband, of being under Steve's control, then Steve didn't want that devotion. He could barely stand the thought of it.
"I wasn't sure you'd like what I was working on."
Steve's stomach sank. Oh, Lord. "Tell me anyway."
"Spaceships."
Steve blinked. That... was not what he'd been expecting, not that he'd had time to think up anything to expect. Something you wouldn't like was an awfully dangerous category when it came to Tony Stark. But—spaceships? "As in designing them, or building them?"
"You know me. And, hey. Thor's not wrong."
"I know, I just... where are you building them?" And why?
"On the far side of the sun. If something goes wrong, there'll be plenty of room to dispose of any mistakes before they get near Earth. And it covers the blind spot in Earth-based detection systems. I figure eventually when I get some designs I really like, give it another six months or so, I can lease them to Earth as needed, use part of myself to run them. Just in case those Star Empires come calling. And when they're not needed for that, hey, it's space. Plenty of room to explore, even for me. I can try and hunt down the Guardians of the Galaxy, see if they exist here."
He sounded... eager. Was that affectation? It was what had been missing from Tony's voice for so long—missing, and unable to be seen in body language, because Tony had changed himself completely. Now he sounded eager, and happy, in a way that he hadn't since—when? And Steve was glad for it, he was, but—"So you're going to leave."
Tony had been right: Steve didn't like it. Not that.
"Not forever. Earth's pretty home-base for me. But I've seen what Earth and the Nine Realms have to offer. The stars, those Star Empires, those are something different. The multiverse is huge, but our universe is pretty huge, too."
"You have a ship that'll take you that far?"
"Not yet. But I'll get pretty damn far in the meantime. And you've got a point, everybody needs a goal. I'm... done with trying to fix things, as mine. I've seen how it works out, too many times."
"Successfully, in the end," Steve said firmly.
"Yeah. And now I'm going to go play Star Trek for a while instead," said Tony casually, and then, even more so, "You could come with me, if you want to."
With him. Into... space. Steve had walked on alien worlds, but... space? Spaceships were still a thing of sci-fi movies. Nobody had even been to the moon for decades.
"I know you're busy. You've got responsibilities here, cleaning up the mess I made, and now literal wildfires—"
"No, I—wait, just give me a minute to get used to the idea," Steve said, exasperated.
"Okay, okay. ...Should I be timing this? Did you mean a literal minute?"
Steve rolled his eyes, and found that he was smiling. Across from him, the drone waggled its wings again, and it didn't really look like a shrug. "I could do a tour or two, after we finally get some rain. JARVIS and SHIELD—I think they've finally got things in hand."
"Great!" Tony said cheerfully. "Needs a captain to be proper Star Trek."
Needed a crew, too. "So long as we stay in contact with Earth."
"Voyager was the worst for a reason."
"I wouldn't know, I haven't seen it." In those months when he'd lived at the Tower he'd seen few episodes of Star Trek, one that had been made in the sixties and a more recent one with an older bald captain, but he wasn't generally inclined to watch enormous amounts of TV.
"Plenty of time to watch all the series while in warp, mon Capitaine," said Tony, and Steve found himself smiling at the nickname.
He'd done a road trip after the Chitauri invasion, to reacquaint himself with America and settle back into his skin. A road trip out to the stars wouldn't help Tony get reacquainted with humanity. But Steve had met enough aliens to know that humanity didn't have a monopoly of any sort on decency, or hope, or life. And after everything... Tony wasn't the only one who could use a road trip, a break to figure out how to go forward instead of back. What happened from there... they'd figure out after.
It would be nice to travel simply for the sake of exploring. Steve grinned, recalling a line from that grave captain.
"Make it so, Number One."
Author's notes: Welp, that's it. Thank you in particular to Morphia for betaing this epilogue (and cheering me on when I wanted to incinerate it instead). And thank you to everyone who has read this series; I hope you enjoyed it. It's been nearly four years since I started working on it... and now, finally, c'est fini.