Would You Look at That?

by Justcallmezari

As if by a strike of fate, the two grown men had become two and half feet shorter and began bawling tears. The smaller boy with the blond hair gasped painful breathes and the boy with the brown hair shook uncontrollably, taking in slightly too much oxygen and crying just as hard. That's how their teammates found them.

"Tony, you have got to eat something." Steve Rogers was known as a patient, honorable, virtuous man. In fact, it was said that there were none other like him. He gave speeches on race equality and volunteered at local soup kitchens. Sometimes, he dressed in full Captain America regalia and visited children in hospitals throughout New York City. He had the patient of a saint and the purity to mach it, but the man located a foot in front of him had the power to send all of Steve's heavenly traits strait to the Pit.

"Yes, I do. I know how a human body works. They don't call me genius for nothing. I'll eat, but not right now. Mkay? Now get the hell out of my shop." Tony kept his back turned to Steve as he had been since the conversation had started, and continued to fiddle with something which Steve had never seen or, he was pretty sure, heard of before.

"Your new project can wait. You've been down here for days. Have you even slept?" Steve's voice held a weary tone and he was annoyed that he had been reduced to a rudimentary sort of pleading. Why couldn't his comrade just get up and join the rest of the team?

"How do you know that it's new?" Although Steve was glad he had gotten Tony's full attention, if the engineer's dramatic turn was anything to go by, he was not in the mood for an entirely new vein of questions.

"That bob there, no the one slightly to the right, yeah that one, I've never seen anything like it. And that whatchamacallit, yeah that one, I've seen it before, but never connected to that thing...no, that one." Tony looked at Steve in something akin to amazement before quickly schooling his face into a mask of indifference.

"You're right. That 'bob' as you so wonderfully put it is a modified diode, nothing like what you would normally see. And the 'whatchamacallit' is a modified rectifer, so modified that I don't think it should even be called a rectifer anymore."

"I have next to no idea what you're talking about, but whatever that does, it's brilliant, I'm sure. Now if we could just go to the dining area..." Steve was near starving by now, his metabolism not understanding the concept of slowdown. He just wanted to go eat.

"No way, I am six hours away from revolutionizing technology as we know it. Food can wait. Go. Eat. I'll find some thing myself. Don't know why we have to eat as a team anyway. Just cause we killed a shitload of doombots doesn't mean I'm willing to cut down on Me time." With that Tony went back to his tinkering, and Steve decide he had had enough.

With a swift step forward, Steve grabbed Tony's shoulder. A low buzzing sound started up and all Steve hear was a muttered "but how?" and everything went dark in time with a bang.