A/N: So, how's it going? Answer in reviews!

"That's one hell of a way for a first date to end, don't you think?"

Tony set down two mugs on the table and slid into his seat. Rogers allowed himself a peek at the floor they were on, a wide-open kitchen with soaring skylights, shiny appliances, and twisted metal sculptures protruding from the floor, the ceiling, and the walls. Everyone modern, modern, modern, modern. He felt a bit unsettled by the sterile ambiance, but he shook it off.

"Sorry I dragged you into this."

"So we have a guy named Matthew Pryce. Your buddy Clint—don't act so surprise, Steve, you were talking pretty loudly on the phone—who sees Pryce gunned down by an unknown entity, and then delivers him to surgery. I've checked the records, surgery at Mount Sinai does have a check-in at around the time Clint reported the incident, and the injuries operated on are consistent with the ones Clint reported and the ones on Pryce's body."

"And then he dies."

"Not so fast. So we have Pryce go into surgery at…"

Tony consulted his phone. "At 16:57, Matthew Pryce is checked into surgery. By 18:16, when you signed the visitor's book, Matthew Pryce has already been out of surgery for a while. He was drinking soup. He was gunned down in the left hand, and he was drinking soup. At 18:23, Pryce crashes. Every single organ fails at once. But up until this point, Pryce did not seem to be in any severe pain, and believed that he had suffered a bicycle accident and not the two shots that Clint witnessed and his body can attest to.

"Then there's the issue of the wounds themselves. I've taken a look at them; exit wounds are consistent with a .22 Walther. But they looked almost healed over, like they've been there for months and not a couple of hours. In addition to no pain, Pryce had no problem using his left hand. Tissue damage had been somehow reversed; the shot should've punctured his flexors, but he still had grasp of the spoon. He's left-handed, as you've noticed."

Rogers had finished half his coffee by this point.

"So we have a guy who has no idea he was just shot, whose gun wounds from the aforementioned shots are healing, and who then suffers total organ failure with no external trigger."

"Correctamundo."

"And then he dies."

"And then he dies," Tony repeated. They both took long sips of coffee; Tony's brow furrowed in thought, Rogers pondering larger questions at hand. He stood up suddenly.

"This is too much to ask for on a first date, I'm sorry. If you want me to leave, I can just walk out that door and you never have to deal with this crazy ever again."

"Oh, shut up. You're staying."

Rogers looked at Tony in confusion.

"What? Why aren't you asking me to leave?"

"Why would I ask you to leave? This is fun."

Tony sipped at his coffee. He liked watching Steve fluster around.

"I don't think…"

"Well I do, more than enough for both of us. And I really like you, Steve. You're not one of those mindless, easily confused bimbos that I hate. You're good, at least in Tony Stark's book."

"Thanks…?"

"Look, I can help you find whoever did this. I can pull strings. I have favors to call in. You can take the underground route, but I can get police resources on it, no questions asked."

Despite his assurances, Tony's innards roiled. He had no idea what had happened last night, and he was beginning to doubt Steve's authenticity. What substitute teacher has a friend that gets shot, forgets about it, then has every organ in his body fail? And then… Pryce had called Steve "boss". Unless he was some kind of substitute principal or he had a bartending apprentice, Tony had a nagging feeling in his gut that Steve had withheld quite a bit of information.

"Okay then," Rogers said, sitting down. "Let's do this."

Tony woke up violently, shifting over stacks and stacks of papers, some of them falling to the ground.

"Shit, shit shit," he cursed, grabbing the files before they all scattered over the floor. He sat up, a dull ache in his back and a sore on the back of his head from sleeping. Tony groaned as he swung his legs over the edge of the table, sending more papers cascading down, and hopped off.

"Good morning."

"Hi. How long was I out?"

"A good three hours."

"Jesus, I have to work."

"Relax, hey, take a break."

"I just took a three hour one. Now back to work."

"Okay, your call," Steve relented. He handed Tony a Starbucks mug, vanilla latte, and handed a thick file to Tony. "I sifted through all of the security stills of the area where Pryce was shot, up to four hours before and after the incident. Barton and Pryce were in a warehouse when it happened."

"About that. What's your relationship with Barton?"

"He's… he's a really good friend."

Steve coughed.

"Okay, I'll take that."

"There's nothing on video. The shooter had the mind to keep his face out of every single camera, but I got the back of his head. The image's grainy, but it seems he has a full head of hair, cut short, not quite military length but coming close, well-built, and blond."

"Is that a scar running down his neck?"

"I'm not sure. It could be, or it could be a security wire. Either way, it's small, and it's not enough to go by."

Tony strode over to his living room and swiped in midair. Glowing images surrounded him, blue screens hovering without wires. Steve's jaw dropped. Tony, seeing his face, smiled to himself. That's what they all do.

"JARVIS, security footage of the warehouse."

"Loading, sir."

A series of images flashed up. Tony threw them onto the walls, and they sharpened, JARVIS touching up the edges. Steve squinted at the one still with the man, the front of his body angled towards the camera but his head turned so it was looking directly away. He was wearing a uniform, presumable a janitor.

"What does that patch say," Tony asked. He zoomed in on a section of the sleeve, where blurry capital letters appeared. "C—A—M, S," Tony made out.

Steve's head snapped up.

"Say that again."

"CAMS," Tony repeated.

"I know what that is."

"What?"

"Carmen Alvarez Middle School. I was subbing there when I met you."

"No, we don't have anyone matching that description working here."

"Alright, thanks for your time."

Rogers ran a hand through his hair. It's been twenty-seven hours since he last slept. Up until this point, he'd been running on caffeine, adrenaline, and cold anger. Pryce was a good friend, not to mention a great lieutenant. He drank too much and he womanized excessively, but the small things Rogers could ignore.

"Anything?"

"No."

Tony frowned.

"Sorry."

"Something's not right here. Why would he be wearing that uniform? It's not a coincidence. He knew that I would be subbing there."

"Who is this guy?"

Tony flubbed down on the couch, exhausted. It's been another 24 hours, and so far, they've followed up on three dead-ends, no help from the police, and Steve calling Pryce's family.

"He doesn't talk with them a lot," Steve explained. "I'm more or less his only contact with society."

The amount of information they had to sift through was astounding. Pryce's autopsy report came in later that afternoon, exactly two days since Tony ran into Steve and a little less since the shooting.

Rogers checked his watch nervously. He had business to attend to, and this business with Pryce was taking an awfully long time. Don't get him wrong, he felt bad that Pryce had to go. But life still went on. And another thing, Tony would be suspicious if he left so early.

"Listen, Tony," he said. "I have to sub today, and school starts in half an hour. I have to go."

"Alright, you know where to find me," Tony called back, not looking up from his tablet, furiously tapping his fingers and checking the papers. "David Ricardo…"

Steve tapped the button for the bottom floor and the doors slid silently shut.

It was ten in the morning.

But still not too early for a drink. Clint emptied the last drips of vodka into Rogers' tumbler and watched as he downed the shot in one gulp, setting the glass down hard enough that Clint feared for the crystal's integrity.

"Are you sure you're okay?"

Rogers nodded, his eyes screwed shut.

"I wonder how I got here."

"'Scuse me?"

"I started out as an orphan in Brooklyn," Steve began. "And then twenty years later, here I am. I don't even remember how and when I first met you."

"I… I'm a serf. I come with the territory."

"Sure you do. If I stepped down right now, if I just swung the white flag and walked away to go to Napa Valley or something for the rest of my life, would you stay here?"

Clint considered it. Then shook his head.

"I'd probably find something in San Francisco."

"Exactly. You're a good friend, Barton," Rogers said, obviously drunk, clapping Clint twice on the back. The blows brought winces to Clint's face; Rogers was much stronger than he looks. Which was already quite fearsome. "Sorry," he muttered. "Do you have any more of this," he asked, pointing at the empty bottle.

"No, no, either you go to bed or you throw up. I've given you as much as you're going to get."

"Fine, I'll go to sleep."

Rogers whined as Clint half-dragged half-slapped Rogers into his bedroom, where he struggled to strip Rogers down to the underwear and shoved him onto the bed. Yes, yes, he knew what it must have looked like. And Clint had to admit; Rogers' figure was anything if not impressive. Clint didn't consider himself one for swinging both ways, but if Rogers asked, he'd go for it. Clint covered Rogers with his blanket and watched him as he passed out almost immediately.

Clint shuttered the windows against the bright mid-morning sun and sauntered back into his living room, tossing the Smirnoff into the recycling and sitting down with a legal pad and a pen. He began to write down what he had to do for the day.

Funeral plans for Pryce and Purcell.

Finding out who's responsible for the missing 30k from the Gauter heist.

Punish aforementioned.

Talk to the bookies about increasing client pressure.

Running that Jenkins extortion scheme he'd always been dying to try.

Jazzercise.

Investigate the restaurant fuck-ups in Brooklyn.

Take out the Castellano point man. He was too chatty.

Everyone gets into the mob for one purpose—money. Most of the time, it's because they lack it. It starts off that way, at least. And then the more brutal ones take control and get richer and richer and they get more and more ruthless and greedier and greedier and pretty soon you've got a pretty accurate replica of capitalism on your hands. Clint had needed money for his mom's cancer. She needed chemo, and they were poor, much too poor to afford it, Clint had barely enough money to get textbooks for high school, but she had insisted. Clint smiled as he remembered his mother, firm, demanding, and soft when she had to be, just as a mother should. He had been an athlete, an archer, looking for a full ride to who-knows-where, but just praying for a miracle. He was the best, the best sharpshooter anywhere, but who needs a star archer on their roster?

He didn't get the scholarship. No scholarship, no chemo.

No chemo, no mom.

He forgot what it was, but he started small and worked his way up, in the mob, that was, killing when he had to, opening little pockets of anarchy here and there that sorted themselves out somehow with Clint Barton at the top. And this continued, after a few years, until he was right under Steve Rogers, the richest and most brutal of them all, the ultimate capitalist. He remembered first meeting him, in that tiny room, where Steve held a gun to a man's bruised and bloody head, calmly counting to ten, then pulling the trigger, and he had looked at Clint, just a few years out of high school, with those dangerous, gleaming blue eyes. And the first thing that came out of his mouth?

"I'm sorry you had to end up here."

"I need the money."

"What for?"

"Mom has cancer."

Steve set down his gun, peeled off his bloody latex glove, and reached into his suit jacket. Clint stood there awkwardly, not sure what was going on, and what this man wanted. If he was dangerous or not. Clint only knew how to deal with the former, and most of them ended with one dead body.

"Is one hundred enough?"

"Dollars?"

"Grand."

"Yes."

Rogers scribbled on the checkbook, signed off, and ripped the checked off for Clint, who gingerly held it.

"Your signing bonus," Rogers dryly remarked, followed with a smile. "Go get your mom the treatment. Take your first day off."

Every time Clint calls back home, mother, now sixty-eight, asks how Steve's doing. And every time, every time he hears her talk, her laugh, or talk about her day, about her old friend Marlene, with whom she plays poker every Friday at the center two blocks away, Clint cries, his voice not showing it but tears streaming down his face as he says,

"Same old, same old."

Clint stood up, walked over to the cabinet stocked full with liquor, and pulled out a bottle of cheap $10 whiskey, unscrewing the lid. He poured two fingers, chewed on his tongue, and poured out two more.

Tony gave up. He tossed his tablet onto the couch. This investigation was too far-flung and too underground to go anywhere. There was the matter of motive; who would want to kill Prcye? He had plenty of enemies as it was, being a member of the local mafia. That had surprised Tony. Steve? Making mob friends? He'd ask him about that.

And then there was the extremely unorthodox manner in which Pryce died. Tony had seen some strange things, but nothing like this. The theories and conjectures and anatomy he studied for his supplement degrees did not help one bit.

He flubbed down on the sofa.

"Shades, please."

The windows grew smoky as JARVIS increased the opacity. Tony closed his eyes. The last image flashing through his brain, through the visual nets and the flow charts he constructed all leading back to Pryce, was a huge question mark flashing over Steve Rogers' head.

Steve woke up with a huge headache. He'd been getting those a lot. Maybe he should cut back on the drink. His shoulder hurt, and the left side of his face felt numb. Steve slapped some sensation back into it, and stared at the clock uncomprehendingly. It was nine. In the morning. He slept at ten. Oh shit.

The door opened at this time.

"Hello?" Steve called out. He heard a gun cock, the quiet patter of footsteps, and a muzzle pointing around the bevel of the doorframe.

"Fuck, you're still here, sorry boss."

Clint flipped the safety back on and set down his back of groceries.

"Why the hell didn't you wake me up?"

"I tried to, but you just punched me. Hard."

Clint lifted up the hem of his t-shirt and showed Steve the green, ugly patch on his left side. Steve winced. He vaguely remembered hitting something, and his hand felt a bit sore.

"Sorry about that."

"Nothing that hasn't been done before. I'm about to leave, soon, again, so…"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm just going to go. And uh, Clint. Thanks for handling my… my breakdown."

Clint laughed.

"That's a breakdown? It's Wednesday night for me. Don't worry about it. I finished your hit list yesterday. You might want to check up on the Brooklyn fiasco, though, the restaurants are collapsing left and right."

"All right. Thanks."

"Anytime, boss."

Steve forced himself up and into the bathroom, where he downed two aspirin for the throbbing in his head and collected the clothes that Clint stacked on the nightstand, neat and folded and smelling freshly washed.

"Sir, your six o'clock appointment is in the lobby."

"Send 'em home, JARVIS."

"It's Mr. Rogers, sir."

Tony's eyes flew open, and he scrambled off the couch.

"I need an elevator to my floor. Hurry."

JARVIS sent a lift screeching down, the doors opening with an innocent ding. He tapped his foot impatiently as the car rose, then deposited him on the thirty-seventh floor, where his bedroom and closet were. He tore off his damp and rank clothes and pulled on some sweats, but they were too small so Tony settled for jeans. A screen flashed before his eyes, showing Steve already in the lift.

"JARVIS, why'd you let him in?"

"What would you have me do otherwise, sir?"

"Delay him, send him crashing down to the basement, give him a movie, just don't let him get up here before I say so!"

The jeans smelled weird. Tony threw the pair behind him and tried on some shorts.

"Thirteenth floor."

"Stop the car."

A faint clack echoed up the elevator shaft. The shorts had a huge bleach spot right over the crotch where Tony spilled a big jug of Clorox on the rare occasion when he does the laundry.

"Shit, shit, shit," he cursed, all of the pants that he had with some defect or another. Khakis with a leg cut off. Sweatpants with a snapped waistband. He finally found his old pair of jeans from high school, grease stains still imprinted into the soft denim, a few holes in it, but otherwise unharmed.

"Where's he now?"

"Still stopped. And trying to break his way out of the elevator, it seems," JARVIS commented, amusement crawling into his British drawl. A computer with an attitude. Tony glanced at the hovering screen, Steve's legs disappearing from view as he climbed up out of the roof of the elevator and into the shaft.

"All right, start it up. But slowly," Tony added, seeing how Steve fell back down to the ground of the elevator just as the car started again.

Tony didn't have time for a shirt. It was clear across the floor. He jogged back to the elevator, where JARVIS had one waiting for him already. The doors closed and JARVIS whisked him down fourteen floors, shirtless, sweating a little bit, his hair a bit messed up, and wearing a pair of jeans.

The doors slid open as Tony ran into the kitchen, pretended to be relaxed, and tossed away the underwear he had been holding just as the doors to Steve's car opened.

"Oh… am I… interrupting something?" He asked, expression priceless. Only then did Tony consider the sight he must be. And he smiled a bit to himself as the full impact hit.

"Oh, no, no, I just… finished working out," he lied. "Anything to drink?"
"Coffee'll be fine," Steve replied, unsure, setting his satchel to lean against the wall. Tony poured two mugs of coffee. He walked into the sitting area slowly and sat down on the couch obscenely close to Steve, who instinctively scooted a couple of inches away, pretending to be poring over the folders, their contents laid out on the floor and the coffee table.

"So what have you found out?"

"Pryce had a couple of enemies. He was mafia, a small official of sorts, overseeing the bootlegging business in Brooklyn among other things."

Tony noticed Steve's faked surprise and filed it away for another time.

"And what about his death?"

"Yeah, about that," Tony answered, swiping his hand in midair. A diagram of an extremely long molecule snaked in the air, wrapping itself around the room and coiling shut into a cube-like figure.

"This is what toxicology returned."

"What is that?"

"Nobody knows."

"That's unsettling."

"No, it's not that nobody knows what it is, or where it comes from, it's just that nobody quite knows how it… got here. This molecule's name is Titan-31B, with an accompanying scientific name that puts titin to shame."

"Titin?"

"Another time. But anyway, it's an extremely complex toxin, undetected by most toxin screens despite its distinctive containment of several unusual elements, such as titanium, bismuth, molybdenum, and one atom each of radon and uranium. It's just too far-fetched to screen for."

"And why does no one know why it 'got here?'"

"It's typically found only in a very rare species of jellyfish. How it's produced has never been witnessed, nor has this molecule ever been produced in a laboratory. It's found in the carcasses of these jellyfish," Tony explained, dragging a blurry color picture of a gargantuan mess of stingers in front of Steve, "the total worldwide population which is only numbered in the low thousands. Only four carcasses have ever been found, each one with high levels of this molecule in its stingers."

"What are we looking at, then?"

"The thing about this toxin is that no one really quite knows what it does. Presumably, what happened to Pryce is what happens when a human comes into contact with it. A delayed reaction several hours later, causing total organ failure as this molecule degrades and wreaks havoc with the rest of the body. But the amounts required to do so are too high; the amount in Pryce is several thousand times higher than the estimated amounts in the total jellyfish population."

"We're looking at some insane, weird toxin that has some unknown effect, used on one of my boot—friends, from a rare jellyfish, and the amount in Pryce is impossible."

Steve licked his dry lips as Tony caught his Freudian slip. Bootlegger, that was what he was going to say. Pryce was a bootlegger.

"Yup, basically."

"Christ. And how was it introduced into Pryce?"

"Probably through the surgeon. But I've checked his credentials; perfectly clean, nothing that could bribe him or blackmail him. He hasn't fled anywhere, and the police have detained him. He maintains his innocence and looks genuinely confused."

"I'll look more into him."

"You do that. How was subbing? You didn't pick up your phone yesterday, or this morning."

"How'd you get my phone number?"

"Sorry."

"Tony."

"I got curious. It's not hard to find you, you know. I simply slipped into the four local school district intranets that are in the general area, searched through their teacher databases, called the school that you were subbing at, and got your phone number from one of the helpful volunteers determined to help their children's education in any way possible, God bless their ignorant souls."

"Or… you could've just checked," Steve answered, plucking his cell from in between the seat cushions. "I left it here yesterday. It's not password protected."

"Or that. But my way's easier."

"So what are we going to do about Pryce?"

"It's up to you. He's your employee."

"Employee?"

"Right before he died, he called you 'boss.'"

"Oh, that. Just an inside joke."

Tony frowned, but went along with it, again filing the information away. Remind JARVIS to create a folder called "Steve Rogers".

"I still have a few more boxes to go through. It's all stuff from the surgeon's apartment," Tony said, casually draping his arm over the back of the couch, around Steve.

"Why isn't the police doing this?"

"I'm a man that gets bored easily. I need something to occupy my time, lest my idle hands do something naughty…"

Tony leaned in close, his lips just an inch from Steve's, but he hovered there, smirking, mouth slightly open, tongue pressed to the back of his left canine flirtingly. Steve didn't look confused, or offended, just pleasantly surprised, and his own hand moved to Tony's knee. Tony's left thumb caressed Steve's shoulder gently. Then he stood up, breaking off whatever happened in between them. Always a tease.

"Let's go get dinner," Tony said, stretching and giving Steve a very nice view. He thought he heard a whimper from the man sitting on the couch, but he just chalked that to a stomach growl. "I'll go shower and then we can eat. No steak this time."

"He'll be the death of me," Steve snarled as Tony walked, humming, into the elevator, still maddeningly shirtless.