July 4th, 2011
New York City
Both Steve and I had to schedule time to meet up, which is new. Not for me, really, but for him. There was once a time when Steve didn't do anything unless it was Avengers work, and it wasn't hard to get a free moment with the guy. I was always the problem then, what with running a multinational corporation and all.
These days, though, it's a different story. With three Avengers teams, an Academy to oversee, and an international anti-terrorism unit to command, Steve has his hands full, and as for me—well, things in the Stark Infinity neighborhood have never been rougher. With both of us this booked, it's been a Herculean feat to meet up at all, even for a quiet drink.
Oh, and I don't drink now, either. God, how things have changed.
It's ten o'clock at night, and the New York skyline is alive with color. The fireworks coming from Rockefeller Plaza shine across the city, and the Empire State Building is lit up in red, white, and blue from street to peak. The Statue of Liberty's dress is a constantly shifting hologram of the American flag, and all across the island, people are in the streets celebrating.
It's the Fourth, yeah, but this kind of celebration is something different. The mood of the country has changed as of late, and even after everything horrible that's gone down in the past few years, you can feel the optimism in this city. The heroes are back in place, and it's a brand new world. There is hope in the air, and everyone is embracing it.
Except, perhaps, the man shouldering that hope. The Top Cop of the World, Steve Rogers.
I find Steve standing at the center of the Mansion, looking up at the skylight. The dome was cracked in the battle, and only a few panes of glass remain. That was nearly three years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.
Steve turns to me. He's in civilian clothes, a sweatshirt and jeans. "Tony."
"Steve." I retract the suit, let it fold back into my clothes, become a t-shirt and pants. I hand him the six-pack I flew in with from Oklahoma. "Here you go. Happy Fourth, buddy."
Steve frowns but takes the case. "Thought you didn't drink."
"Non-alcoholic. Don't lecture me."
I snapped that. I really didn't mean to snap that. Steve looks away, and for a second, I feel like a complete jackass. I start to apologize when he speaks up.
"I was just thinking how it's funny what you remember after the fact. That saying about hindsight and all."
He pauses. I don't interrupt. I've known Steve long enough to know when to let him talk.
"Thing is, it wasn't all this"—he gestures around the room, at the skylight and the broken walls and the burn mark on the floor where a Quinjet engine pod exploded—"that was on my mind. Maybe it has something to do with wearing a flag on my chest for most of my adult life, but the Fourth of July has always meant something to me. It gets me thinking back, remembering different things, sometimes in a new light.
"During the war, we spent a lot of holidays in the field, and every single fourth of July. But I got to thinking about one in particular, and I realized something about it that, at the time, I couldn't possibly have known."
I can feel the story coming, one of his classic Steve Rogers war stories. Cap. Bucky. The Nazis, Freedom and justice. Etcetera.
I'm right, too. He does have a war story. And like always, he doesn't disappoint.
July 4th, 1943
Carbo, France
It was sixty-seven years ago and I can still smell the soil, dank and thick and full of blood. According to the villagers, the ground around the castle had been like that for years, ever since the Baron left and the Nazis moved in. They liked to kill resistance fighters and throw them over the walls, letting their bodies soak into the muck. That was business as usual.
But the lightning, that was recent. Two months recent. Storm clouds building above the castle towers, strange screams in the night, strange aircraft moving in and out of the grounds—Allied intelligence knew that meant Nazi secret ops, and Nazi secret ops meant the Red Skull.
It all boiled down to me and Bucky crawling up the slope to the castle, moving on our stomachs, pushing through the slop. For me, the task wasn't all too difficult, but it was a steep incline, and we'd hiked four miles to get this far, so Bucky was breathing a little deep by the time we got to the top. He would be fine in a few minutes, I knew, but he still needed a breather, and we were on a tight schedule. I told him to stay here while I went inside, and catch up with me later.
"C'mon, Steve, I can do it." I could hear the strain in his voice as he tried to keep from breathing heavily. I couldn't help but smile.
"Good try, Buck, but we can't let any variables into this." I held out the radio. "Keep a look out. If anything goes wrong, or if I'm not out in ten, you call the cavalry."
Bucky frowned. I knew he was ticked about staying behind—what nineteen year old kid wouldn't be?—but he's never been stupid. He knew the stakes were high. They always were with the Skull.
He took the radio. "You got it, Cap. Kick him in the cranium for me, huh?"
I laughed, told him to stay safe, and slipped in through a window.
In hindsight, it's funny how little we always knew going into a situation. Back then, intelligence seemed only to exist to tell us that something bad was happening. It seems strange from the modern perspective, with our helicarriers and internets, but back then, the what, why, who, and how of operations were largely unknown factors. All HQ ever told us was where, and figuring out the rest—including how to deal with whatever we found—was up to our 'natural ingenuity'.
So that night in the castle above Carbo (we didn't even know the castle name) I decided to do a little exploring before getting myself shot at.
The corridors were stone and low where I entered, built that way to withstand sustained cannon fire. It was an old castle, built when that kind of siege was an imminent problem. It seemed by the cables running along the floor that the Nazis were using the siege halls for power conduits. The cables were light gauge, which meant light wattage—nothing that you could run a death ray or zombie amplifier on, but they'd work well for lights and cameras.
I followed them anyway, and made my way out onto a walkway. The walk had a banister on one side, and below, I could see a high-ceilinged dining hall. The dining table was covered with charts, maps of Europe marking Allied troop displacements in Sicily, Italy, and locations of known bases in the UK.
A typical command center for German intelligence. Kind of a low-key operation for someone like the Skull.
One of the officers at the table stretched, groaned, looked over his shoulder and up. Our eyes locked for an awkward moment, and then he started shouting. He almost got to 'Kaptin Amerikaneer' before the shield smashed his jaw. The rest of the officers were just turning around when I jumped, and almost had their guns out by the time I landed on their conference table.
I caught the shield upon landing and looked at the nearest one, a First Lieutenant. "You. Tell me where the Skull is and I'll leave you in one piece."
The officer didn't answer, tugged his Walther out of its holster, and I kicked him in the neck. He fell gurgling.
A man to my right got off the first shot. I dodged, spun on my hand, kicked, knocked him into his friend. Another officer jumped off his chair, swinging two-handed at my head. I twisted, planted a boot in his gut and helped him into the air. He landed in a pile of maps.
The rest went down easy. No alarm was raised. I went back to the Lieutenant.
"The Skull." I slammed him against the table, something gave in his back. "Where is he?"
"Let the boy go, herr Rogers. I'm right here."
The Skull stood above the dining hall, on the walkway where I'd come in. He was in combat gear, camouflage and netting, holding a machinegun in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other.
It sounds almost cliché, I suppose, the drink and gun combination, but you have to remember that he set the trend for villain cliché. So, while it might seem hackneyed for Doctor Doom or Magneto to hold a weapon and a mixed drink while threatening you, when the Red Skull does it, the effect is just terrifying.
I dropped the lieutenant and let him scurry off into the colonnades. "About time you showed up, Skull. I was worried I'd have to tear the place apart to find you."
He took a drink. Most of it slipped through his lipless mouth and ended up on his fatigues. He ignored it, and kept smiling down.
"Oh, my dear Kaptain, you haven't just found me," he said, gesturing with the barrel of his machinegun, "you've found a dozen of me."
I looked. Around the peripheries of the dining hall, like red beacons out of the shadows stepped a full squad of Red Skulls, all armed, all dressed alike, all grinning the same deathly grin. All headed for me, in lockstep.
The Skull, the true Skull on the balcony, laughed. I cinched the shield down on my arm and eyed the closing death team.
"Let's do this," I told them.
And they did.
It made no sense. Multiple Red Skulls, I mean. I wanted to know why, sure, but that wasn't the first thing on my mind. Surviving the first fusillade of bullets took priority.
The shield took most of them, and my back took the other four. They were small-caliber—MP40s, all of them—and between my biology and the chain-link flak vest material of my uniform, they didn't cause any fatal injuries.
But getting shot still hurts and, more importantly, it slows me down.
They were on me inside of two seconds, punching and kicking and stabbing with knives. Six of them came in, six held off, waiting for clear shots, reloading their weapons. If they had been regular men in skull masks, I could have thrown them off easily enough, but I quickly learned that wasn't the case at all.
None of them had pressure points in any of the right places, and their strength was way more than even the best Aryan shock trooper. In fact, it was like fighting six of me, all moving at once, all leering at me with his face.
One of them pinned me and punched down. I jerked my head out of the way, his fist dented the stone floor. I punched back. The hit snapped his head back, past the breaking point of his neck, and I threw him off. Another lunged down, and I caught him with the flat of the shield in his nose. The next took the edge in his gut, and I kicked another away.
The last of the six grabbed me in a headlock, holding me still while the gunner Skulls got their aim steady. I waited until they fired, then knocked my way out of the hold and dove aside, shield up.
Half the gunners adjusted their aim, and the shield vibrated under the hail of led. The other half didn't, and the headlock Skull went down, body shaking, tearing under hundreds of impacts.
I threw the shield at the gunners, got three bounces, caught it on the back-swing, and charged into them. From there it was all basic fighting arithmetic: thumb to eye socket, foot to throat, shield to face. The fight was over as quickly as it had begun.
I turned to the real Skull, shield ready to block whatever bullets he wanted to throw my way. "Is that it?"
"Not even close, herr Rogers," he laughed, pointing at the broken bodies of his duplicates.
I looked. They weren't so broken anymore.
The ones in the first group got back to their feet, barely damaged. The one whose neck I snapped with a punch was fine, his neck still intact. Broken arms were back in place, it seemed, and I realized that they'd never been broken at all in the first place. Apparently, the differences between these Skulls and a normal man didn't stop at pressure points.
One look at the dead one, the victim of friendly fire, was enough evidence to prove that. His body, still in Nazi fatigues, had changed—morphed back into its native form, green skinned and thin. The muscles were in different formations, sinuous bulges across the lithe body.
I thought at the time that this was what the Skull had been working on: green-blooded mutations of men, designed to infiltrate Allied command. Nowadays, I know the difference.
They all got to their feet and started in toward me. None of the weapons on the ground floor had any ammo left, and without a way to break their necks or smother them, I had no permanent way of putting them down. Escape through this many combatants was out of the question, and without any way of putting them out of commission, I would eventually be worn down.
Thankfully, Bucky figured out a better way.
The eastern wall exploded, and the nosecone of a B-25 Mitchell slammed into the dining hall. The bomber's wings sheared off on impact, leaving the engines spinning free of their mounts. A flaming propeller careened through the hall, heading for my face. I blocked it with the shield, but the Skull standing next to me wasn't as lucky. Green blood splashed the stone, and he fell for good.
The Mitchell's canopy opened and the Howling Commandos poured out, spitting bullets into the fray. Fury landed next to me, .45 chucking rounds into the shape-shifter next to him.
"Hey, Cap."
"Fury." I ducked a swing from a Skull, punched him in the gut, and let Fury put him down for good. "Nice entrance."
"Well, yer partner figured you could use the help. Since when's there more'n one o' this guy, anyway?" The dead Skull at his feet shifted to its green form. "What the hell?"
"Tell me about it." I looked back to where the real Skull had been, just in time to see him disappear down a side passage. "Damnit, he's getting away. Fury, listen—"
"Shut up and go, Cap!" Fury screamed. "We'll cover ya!"
I thanked him and ran off after the Skull. As I left, I could hear Nick shouting at Dugan for more ammo and a cigar. I hoped he would send Bucky my way, and ducked off into a side passage, hunting for the Red Skull.
July 4th, 2011
New York City
Steve stops abruptly. I wait for him to continue. I wait for a full thirty seconds before it becomes apparent that he's done before speaking up.
"Well, what happened?"
He looks up at me, as if he forgot I was there in the first place. "Oh, we never found him. I think he got out using the catacombs under the castle, but it was never confirmed."
"That does sound like him," I agree. "So, they were Skrulls, huh?"
Steve nods. "I suppose so. I didn't know it at the time, though, but in hindsight—well, you get the idea." He smiles and looks away, back at the skylight. "Don't know why it was on my mind. Thanks for listening, though."
"Don't sweat it." I walk over and look up with him. Outside, the fireworks are bursting, letting the wind carry the sparks through the streets and across the Mansion's air space. "You know, I'd almost forgotten your stories."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, you've been at this job longer than most of us. I guess I'd just forgotten how much you've seen. Hearing you reminisce again… I don't know. It's just good to have you back."
Steve looks at me. "Thanks, Tony. Good to be back."
We watch the fireworks for a little while longer, and chat about this and that, but pretty soon life gets in the way and we've both got to get going to our respective responsibilities. I say goodbye, extend the suit and take off.
My last vision of Steve is in the middle of the Mansion, hands in his pockets, swathed in the red, white, and blue streaming in from the night sky.
Top Cop? Okay, fine, but to me he'll always be Captain America.