Many thanks to Kae Richa and robert32514 for your feedback! This is admittedly filler for the most part, but I hope it doesn't disappoint anyways.
Edit: Somehow I missed my original author's not when I copied and posted this to the site. Anyway, here it is:
This chapter is dedicated to the victims of the Orlando mass shooting. One man's hatred may have taken their lives, but he can never erase them from our hearts and memories. Love will always overcome.
Disclaimer: I own nothing under copyright.
Chapter 9: Bonnie and Clyde
"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."
― Mae West
On November 2, the first of the Mark V's came out: Striker Eureka. It was just in time for Scott Hansen to be kicked out of the PPDC in an incident that would surely become legend, if only because no one knew exactly what happened. At the same time, Chuck Hansen graduated the Jaeger Academy and was sent off to Sydney to copilot with his father.
Half a month after Striker Eureka, Stark Industries finished with their first jaeger. There was a christening ceremony, with the Becket brothers shattering a champagne bottle on the left foot on the gigantic machine. Who better to introduce a new jaeger than two successful pilots?
When he heard the name of the machine, Steve grinned. What better than Widowmaker for two assassins?
There were some disgruntled mutterings about standard naming procedure, but Tony shut those down quickly. "I build it, I name it," he said pointedly.
Not another peep was heard.
The crowd watched with interest as the pilots dropped what looked like briefcases on the ground in front of them. They were both black and gold, but Clint's had purple accents to Nat's red. Each stepped forward without pause, fully confident in Tony's engineering, and were rewarded with metal plates crawling up their bodies and fitting together seamlessly.
Surprised, Steve glanced over and down at his boyfriend. "Are those…?" he trailed off.
Tony grinned proudly as the modified Iron Man suits finished assembling themselves. "No weapons, but I kept the flight capabilities and they have complete life support systems integrated, all powered by miniature arc reactors," he said. Sharp brown eyes watched for problems as Nat and Clint activated the thrusters, amazing their audience as they flew up to land on their jaeger's head.
The assassins disappeared into the conn pod and from there, everyone turned their attention to the screen showing what the inside cameras saw. Nat was settling into the right side treads and Clint the left.
Steve carefully studied the harnesses that attached themselves to the armor, storing it away. This was probably something like what was cooked up for him and Tony.
"Initiating pilot to pilot protocol," announced a voice inside the conn pod. It sounded like… But that was impossible.
"Is that Bruce's voice?" Steve asked pointedly. It was more than a little exciting, but made him long for home like nothing else so far.
The grin on Tony's face even as he watched his friends react, was smug. "I installed a learning AI like JARVIS and gave it video clips of Bruce," he answered, "It figured out the voice pretty fast." He was either the most brilliant man alive or the stupidest. It all depended on whether the assassins tried killing him for his little surprise later.
"Anything I should know about the AI in ours?" Steve questioned. If it sounded like Thor, or (dear God) Fury, he was going to have words with his boyfriend.
"It's just JARVIS," Tony said with a shrug.
Relieved, Steve turned his attention back to the jaeger tests. Of course. It was just the most advanced AI to ever exist, in this universe or their own.
"I apologize for startling you, Sir and Miss," said the AI in a voice that almost sounded apologetic, to the amazement of everyone who heard, "I am the AI that Tony Stark designed for your use in the Widowmaker. He called me BRUCE, after the man whose voice I was trained to simulate."
Awkwardly, Clint cleared his throat. "No problems, buddy. Let's get going," he said in a metallized voice, and steadied himself in preparation.
Wordlessly, Nat adjusted into a more stable position.
"Commencing pilot to pilot protocol," announced BRUCE.
This time there was no flinch, just the nod of a purple helmet. Then the Drift initiated, only noticeable in the way that both pilots went completely still. It seemed to last forever.
On the ground, Tony shifted nervously.
Steve put a hand on his boyfriend's lower back to try to comfort him. It seemed that the only one who didn't have faith in Tony's ability to do this right was the man himself.
"Pilots calibrating," BRUCE announced mildly.
Then Nat and Clint raised the right arm in a punch.
The Widowmaker followed seamlessly.
Scientists, military leaders, students, jaeger pilots, and the press all cheered. They did it. Another jaeger was functional, at least so far.
"Hey, what's this button?" Clint asked, pointing at something on the holographic screen ahead of him.
"That activates the pulse gauntlets, sir," answered BRUCE politely.
"None of this 'sir' stuff, it's creepy in Bruce's voice," Clint reprimanded and focused his attention on another button.
"Call me Nat and him Clint," Nat instructed, voice similarly metallized, before slapping Clint's hand away from a switch on a pedestal between them.
"I will endeavor to do so in the future. For now, I believe that an explanation on operating the Widowmaker is necessary," BRUCE said. For an AI, he already had a good understanding of what was going on.
Long story short, there were several weapons available to them depending on the situation. They all were tested at least once, including the pulse gauntlets, each of the two plasma cannons ("Based on Gipsy Danger's. They seem particularly effective," Tony explained, to the Beckets' obvious pride), abdominal rocket launchers, and a unibeam. The last one was an obvious holdover from the Iron Man suit, venting the excess power generated by the arc reactor to create what may as well be a laser capable of cutting straight through nearly anything.
"You can use the buttons and switches to activate each of the weapons, or issue a command to me to do so," BRUCE went on after he had given them the rundown, "Other features include 180 degree range of motion on each of the major joints, back jets, boot thrusters, and a top access escape hatch. Your drive suits are equipped with full life support systems and flight capabilities, and I am installed in their software. If you ever are in a situation that requires it, I am fully capable of ejecting you myself. Do you have any questions?" It was an impressive array of features, with a formidable intelligence in both pilots and programming.
"How do we know you're not going to go SkyNet on us?" Clint asked.
Now that Steve had watched the Terminator movies, he got the reference. If anyone but Tony had made BRUCE, he would be worried too.
"My parameters are specifically set to keep that from happening," BRUCE assured the pilots, "In addition, my brother AI has been very adamant that I learn what not to do in order to keep my pilots in peak condition." It must have meant JARVIS.
"Tony made you. That's good enough for me," Nat said, and as far as the assassins were concerned, that was that.
It really was, Steve thought as he watched the tests through to the end. As expected, there were no outright malfunctions in the equipment. A few flaws presented themselves in the rather light armor, but that was the tradeoff for speed and flexibility that put Striker Eureka to shame and kept to the assassins' fighting style. The plasma cannons were slow to load, making Tony mutter discontentedly, but that was the stuff of upgrades.
When the tests were over, the Widowmaker was given a hearty stamp of approval by the higher ups.
Of course, that meant that Tony was besieged by the military trying to get him to design more jaegers and weapons. Before he could tell them all to go fuck themselves, Steve dragged him away to meet up with the newly unhooked Nat and Clint.
They took off their helmets, revealing slightly dazed faces and messy hair. "You coulda given a guy a warning about the AI voice," Nat said. Words that usually would have come from Clint's mouth sounded strange coming from hers.
"I thought you of all people would like it," Tony pouted.
"A warning would have been great," Clint repeated, unamused.
"What happened to the Bruce in this universe, anyway?" Steve asked. Somehow he hadn't thought about the other Avengers' copies, or their associates.
Tony's smile was tight as he answered. "Pretty much everybody's dead here," he answered, "A lab experiment killed Bruce instead of turning him into Big Green, nobody's heard from Asgard since the Vikings, and most everybody else we know except Sam died in the first few kaiju attacks." It was expected, but sad none the less.
Then Steve thought about what killed their own alternate selves- and froze. "Bucky," he said hoarsely.
Nat made a questioning noise, but Tony got the memo immediately. "Oh shit," the genius swore, eyes wide, "We need to get the other Nat's file. Pronto pup."
There was no time that day, everyone too busy expatriating the Widowmaker and his pilots to Nagasaki. A copy of Nat's file was smuggled into the conn pod with her, but there was no time to look for clues together. Not that it was needed.
When Steve looked at the original, his stomach twisted. It was the same incident report that had been thrown onto the internet back in their home universe. The only difference was that this Nat didn't live to tell the tale.
"Shot the tire out and then got the engineer straight through Nat. Soviet slugs, no rifling," Tony read off with dark eyes, "It looks like Zola liked to play god no matter what universe he was in." He snapped the folder shut in favor of the internet.
"What are you looking at?" Steve asked from behind the rest of the file. He was trying to determine the differences, what gave their Nat a chance at life but not this one. In this universe, the paramedics had been at a dumpling stand inside the city instead of heading to the outskirts for fried chicken. That meant that instead of being within a mile of the incident, they were a good five miles away here.
"To plot out a pattern, we need more than one data point," Tony answered mysteriously as he clicked a few times.
When Steve saw the picture of Howard Stark, he knew exactly what was going on. Instead of asking, he got up to look over his boyfriend's shoulder.
In this universe Howard died the same way he did back home: an auto accident on the way back from a charity gala when Tony was seventeen. "The pictures all look the same as ours," the genius reported stoically.
Steve swallowed harshly as he looked at the remains of the vehicle that his friend died in. It was nothing more than a twisted heap of smoldering metal. Had the crash gotten Howard, or had he slowly suffocated on the smoke?
"We need another data point to finalize it," Tony said quietly.
"President Kennedy," Steve put in.
This time, he was the one given a blank look. "JFK, really?" Tony asked, as if he couldn't believe his ears.
"Zola showed some pictures when he was stalling. One was of President Kennedy's assassination," Steve said with a grimace. After all this time, it was still hard to believe his friend had done those things. He never blamed Bucky for any of it, HYDRA was responsible in his point of view, but that didn't change who had been used to those ends.
"Was it just JFK or Robert too?" Tony asked.
"Not sure," Steve admitted. He leaned forward interestedly as his boyfriend put in both names, just in case.
Both came up as Soviet slugs, no rifling, fired from an extreme distance by an expert marksman that no one got a single glimpse of. The hallmarks of the Winter Soldier.
Grimly, Steve looked at the photos from both crime scenes. "It's him," he confirmed.
"But if the super soldier program never existed here, then why? How would Zola even get the idea to try the experiments that would do this?" Tony questioned as he put in a search for the phrase 'Winter Soldier'.
It took a few minutes of looking at conspiracy websites (that varied in the author's sanity) for Steve to come up with a decent answer. "There were all sorts of medical experiments going on at the time," he said, residual horror washing over him as he recalled all the times he had come across them and so often been unable to save the poor people, "The Germans had Mengele, the Japanese had Unit 451. I suppose that in this universe the Germans also had Zola." It wasn't that hard of a stretch to think that the mad doctor had the idea himself.
Tony looked disgusted. "It looks like we've got another Winter Soldier to save," he said, and wiped the search history.
The idea was less than appealing. They had gotten lucky last time, in a way. According to Bucky, the programming had been wearing off by the time of their fight on the helicarrier. His instinctive knowledge that this was Steve and important to him had saved them both from a sticky ending.
What would happen when this Winter Soldier didn't have memories of a big, Dorito shaped Stevie to help him connect back to the world? It was a question for later.
And to be delegated. It was a good thing Clint and Nat were already assigned on that side of the world, Steve thought as Tony fired off a message to BRUCE. At least for now, that was the most secure way of getting information between the pilot pairs- one AI to another.
For now, it was bedtime. One more jaeger was there to protect the world. At least tonight, they could sleep a little more soundly.
In December, SI's other jaeger was completed. The amazingly fast pace of the production was explained by Tony as an assembly line process: when the equipment was done with one part of a jaeger, it went to that same part on the other. Only a more experimental armory had delayed this one for the past three weeks.
"I designed it to bridge the gap between our fighting styles," Tony explained as they watched the Beckets again christen a jaeger. This one was Iron Patriot, both a compromise between their Avengers titles and homage to a friend left behind in the other universe. In looks it fit the bill, a red and blue monster with a gold visor, and a pinup style decal on the left pectoral of an Ironette holding the shield.
Steve made a noise of interest as he clutched the briefcase that would fold out into his drive suit. It was a little nerve wracking, no matter that he trusted Tony's ability with technology. He hadn't flown anything more than twenty feet since crashing the Valkyrie in 1945.
"For you there's punching power with the roll of nickels and stun spike fists," Tony continued, not acknowledging his boyfriend's anxiety, "For me, I put in scaled up repulsors. Of course there's the unibeam and some shoulder missiles, and we both like to wrestle our opponents, so I put in some extra strength-" He was cut off when Steve dropped his briefcase on the ground. It was time.
The moment he stepped onto the treads, Steve started getting encased in armor. To be honest, it was kind of terrifying. No matter how used to the modern world(s) he thought he had gotten, there was always something to make him feel old fashioned. And voluntarily helpless, in this case.
There was no darkness inside the helmet. Instead images of everything around him were projected, along with stats and gauges. How Tony kept track of everything…
"Hello, Captain Rogers. May I be of assistance?" JARVIS's wonderfully familiar voice said.
Steve had practiced with the drive suit before. He knew how to operate it, how to use the repulsors and maintain a steady flight. That didn't stop the uncertainty as he ascended to the top of Patriot's head to enter the conn pod.
In the right side spot, Steve's skin crawled when the harness attached itself. It was still a little too modern for his tastes. But that was this world.
"Initiating pilot to pilot protocol in five, four..." JARVIS announced.
Steve grinned as he glanced to his left. Tony's drive suit looked exactly like one of the Iron Man suits. Maybe it was one. "Ready to be traumatized?" he teased.
"Depends on if you slept with my dad," Tony returned. There was a beat of awkward silence before he asked, "Wait, that's actually a legitimate question." Of course, he would wonder about something like that.
"You're about to find out," Steve answered. He hadn't. Sure, he'd thought about kissing the man, and they flirted more than was safe at the time, but nothing had come of it. Now he thanked everything holy.
"Connection initiated," JARVIS said placidly.
Memories flashed by. Being beaten up in an alley and making a circuit board, the agony of Project Rebirth and the installation of the arc reactor, being frozen alive and dying cold and alone in space, they all blended together in a soundless blur of blue. By now they knew each other's most important memories just as well as their own and the emotions that the thoughts conjured in each other were just as familiar. Only the minor memories changed, some more prominent than others. Finally it was done, they were back in their own bodies.
Except not. They weren't Steve and Tony anymore, they were SteveandTony, or Stony, or some other weird and stupid portmanteau name that described them as one being. What one thought, the other knew not even a second later.
"Your neural handshake is astoundingly strong, sirs. Shall we begin testing mode?" asked JARVIS.
"Don't make me wait another minute, baby," Tony said with a grin. There was a relieved feeling in their chests, one that was nothing short of home. Despite being in a whole different universe, this was exactly where they belonged.
The tests went splendidly in Steve's opinion. Everything did exactly as described, and while he felt let down by the lack of 180 degree mobility, other advantages made up for it. The armor was better than on the Widowmaker, in a tradeoff for speed about equal to Striker Eureka. There were spikes on the knees (capable of cauterizing any wounds they caused to keep kaiju blue from getting everywhere) due to Steve's habit of using his whole body as a weapon. And then there was what JARVIS pointed out as, "a perfectly serviceable emergency weapon," in the form of coolant vents strategically placed for maximum impact.
Of course, Tony found fault in everything and mentally noted all of it down for later improvements. It almost made Steve's head spin with the speed.
When they took their first steps into the water, Steve knew and Tony agreed: the speech at graduation was more than just one of Clint's pranks now. They were in it until the end. In living and in dying, until the Rangers release them or the apocalypse take them.
