Disclaimer: I own nothing.

A/N: Spoilers for the movie. I've decided to combine Tony and Steve's perspectives on both the scene this story is based off of and the movie in general.

Summary for this chapter: Steve Rogers is a man out of time. He went to sleep in a war and woke up only to be asked to fight in another one. He was a soldier. The perfect soldier. But all he wants now is to get away from the battlefield and Tony Stark certainly isn't helping.


Steve Rogers was a man out of his time. The last thing he remembered before waking up in an unfamiliar room was the cold steel of the plane controls against his hands as he braced himself for impact. He went to sleep in a war and woke up nearly seventy years later only to be asked to fight in another one. It made no difference to him that one was against the Nazis and the other a power-hungry god from another world. It was still a war and all he could think of was the battlefield.

They won the battle, Captain America and his new team of "Avengers." Yet, he knew there would be others soon enough. It didn't matter that people were fighting amongst themselves a little less than in the 1940's. Now there were new fights with super villains who had technology not all that different than what Hydra had been using. The fact that SHIELD had been trying to use the tesseract to imitate those kinds of weapons…he wasn't really sure how he was supposed to feel about that.

It wasn't that Steve wasn't trying to acclimate to the future. But it was made awfully difficult when he couldn't close his eyes without seeing Bucky fall down a mountainside or Schmidt's sneering red skull. His dreams were memories and every time he woke he was reminded that he was here in this place with its skyscrapers and nuclear weapons and everything in between. So he didn't sleep much, choosing instead to destroy punching bags in the SHIELD headquarters.

He wondered if maybe it wouldn't be so bad if the dreams were his only reminders, but that wasn't an option when he was faced with Tony Stark on an almost daily basis. Their first meeting had been…tense to say the least. He could admit that a significant part of that was his fault.

Steve had been told about Tony Stark, had read a file and been shown video clips. But nothing could have prepared him for meeting the man in person. It baffled him that someone who looked so much like Howard could be so different. The genius was the same, of course it was. The man was essentially a symbol of the future with all his inventions. The arrogance however was something else, something that almost reminded him of Bucky. So he was harsh and judgmental, lashing out whenever he could and naturally, Stark responded in kind.

He was surprised though, by the extent of exactly how wrong he had been about Tony Stark. He had accused him of only looking out for himself, of being nothing without a suit of armor that he couldn't begin to understand the mechanics behind. And yet, it had been Stark who almost died to save the world, carrying a missile on his back and into another dimension. Cutting the wire might be a way out, but Steve had forgotten that sometimes cutting it could be as dangerous as laying down over it.

One thing was for certain; Steve owed him an apology. It wouldn't be right away though. Steve needed time to get his head on straight, to stop picking fights simply because the battlefield was the only place he felt comfortable. He needed to learn to live in the future regardless of the fact that he craved the past. Perhaps Tony Stark would be the one to help him with that. They would have to see.


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