Chapter Ten

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Steve pulled the last dummy upright and turned to face Thor again. "Okay, let's go through that one more time."

Thor beamed, a flash of white teeth splitting his face before he settled into a sparring position. His mode of fighting was subtly different from anything Steve had studied under SHIELD, and the sheer alien quality of it tended to throw the others off at times. Over the last couple weeks, they had spent a great deal of time working with each other, trying to ensure that things would run smoothly in an actual combat situation.

"Very well, Captain - ready yourself." Thor liked fighting with the captain. Neither Clint nor Natasha possessed enough strength to meet him on equal grounds, and Stark preferred to fight with blasts from his reactors. Steve could meet him with sheer muscle, more the style he was used to.

Steve shifted his feet, bracing his forearms behind his shield, and tucking his chin. The bullet wound in his back was completely healed, which was fortunate, since this would have been rather painful otherwise. "Okay, go."

Thor leaped, bringing down the hammer as Steve thrust up with the shield. The resulting shockwave was poorly aimed, sending only half the dummies to the floor, as well as a rack of weights. Tony, just coming in through the doors of the gym, was swept off of his feet and landed hard on his back.

"Ow," he grumbled, clambering slowly up as Steve came across the floor to make sure he was all right. Waving away the proffered hand, he leaned an elbow against the wall, rubbing his chest. "Wow, I need to start wearing the suit 24/7."

Sure that his friend was all right, the captain returned to the sparring floor, only to see Thor hefting his hammer experimentally, thoughtful lines appearing in his forehead. "Bowl me your shield," the alien prince suddenly said.

Steve lifted his eyebrows. "What, you getting hungry?"

"No, bowl it to me, as in your game of baseball," Thor insisted, and the captain finally understood. The alien had come with him a number of times to watch baseball games, and had become quite taken with the sport. Since Peggy's arrival, she had begun joining them and enjoyed complicating the process by teaching him the terms of cricket over Steve's increasingly indignant protests.

"Pitch," he corrected, poising himself to throw. "No matter what Peggy tells you, it's called pitching in America. Here goes."

He threw his shield, and Thor measured its approach with a practiced eye. The resulting swing was more enthusiastic than technical, but the hammer connected solidly with a great ringing sound, and the shield skimmed across the room, burying itself more than halfway into the padded wall a foot and a half from Tony's startled face.

Tony Stark always denied that he shrieked like a girl, but it was times like this that proved him wrong. Steve desperately hoped that one of the assassins or JARVIS had been in a position to record the sound for posterity.

"Gah!" Tony gasped. "What is wrong with you guys? You're like a couple of walking natural disaster zones."

"We are playing baseball," announced Thor as Steve apologized, yanking his shield out of the wall with some effort. "It is very good fun."

Tony adjusted his sunglasses and stared flatly over them for a minute. "I distinctly remember baseball being both incredibly boring and way less life-threatening."

Thor laughed easily. "You should join us; it is far better than you think. Of course, you could not wield my hammer, but you could don your suit and catch."

"Yeah, speaking of which," Tony zeroed in on the hammer swinging freely in Thor's hand. "When are you going to let me run tests on that thing? Mystery metal and all that."

"You may test it whenever you like," Thor offered grandly, a twinkle in his eye, "so long as you carry it to your laboratory yourself."

Tony stepped forward at once, rolling up his sleeves, but was interrupted by a sound at the door.

"Ah, Tony?" Bruce was in the doorway, a duffle bag in his hand. "Is this a bad time?"

Tony wheeled. "You just saved Thor from having his hammer handed to him, that's all." His voice lowered as he neared his friend. "What's up?"

Bruce shifted uncomfortably. "I - ah, wanted to introduce you to someone."

Steve frankly stared as a petite Asian woman stepped into the doorway next to Doctor Banner. Tony whistled.

"Brucie, you brought a girl home? I'm so proud of you." Ignoring Banner's sudden flush, he stepped forward, whipping his sunglasses off entirely. "Hi," he addressed the woman. "Tony Stark, billionaire. I'm his lab buddy. Break his heart, I'll break your hard drive."

Bruce was very red. "It's not like that, Tony," he interrupted. "This is an associate of mine, Doctor Helen Cho. We met a couple years back during a scientific retreat. She's a geneticist and neuroscientist specializing in molecular synthetic-organic interfaces."

Something about that last sentence must have been important, because Steve saw the instant Tony changed from his lighthearted facade to the single-minded inventor. "Really? Fascinating. Bruce, we'll use your lab - it's more set up for things like this."

They turned to leave, but Doctor Cho leaned in and asked Bruce something in a low voice. He immediately came around again. "Oh sure, sorry. Steve, Thor, this is Doctor Cho."

They both smiled and nodded, but Doctor Cho only had eyes for Thor. She had been staring at him since she had come into the room, and Steve discreetly turned his head to hide a grin at the look on her face as Thor shifted his hammer to offer her his hand, obliviously friendly. Out of all the Avengers, the alien prince was the most popular in Asian countries for some reason, and was the one most likely to get coerced into cheerfully posing for pictures with swarms of Asian tourists wherever they went.

"What are we waiting for?" demanded Tony, bouncing impatiently at the doors, and the doctor reluctantly followed Bruce out of the gym.

"She seems nice," Steve commented, planting his feet and bringing up his shield again. Thor raised his eyebrows and brought the hammer down harder than the time before. The shockwave rolled up the wall and momentarily flattened Clint's rope course against the ceiling.

"Not as nice as my Jane," he replied with a flash of white teeth, and Steve nodded, understanding completely. After all, he had never met a woman he liked better than Peggy.

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Tony Stark didn't tell people things.

Well, he told Pepper things, and Pepper told those things to other people when she felt it was necessary. It was probably against something in her confidentiality contract, but since Pepper herself was the only one who would have been able to identify the exact clause, it was a moot point.

So for Tony to actively avoid the other residents of the tower - well, that just meant he had something on his mind that he didn't want to share.

For a week after Doctor Cho arrived in New York, Tony practically vanished. He spent all his spare time holed up in the labs with Bruce Banner and Helen Cho, and skipped out after every meeting he attended so quickly that even Steve couldn't catch him. Everyone knew something was up, but nobody could corner him long enough to find out what, and JARVIS became singularly unhelpful and taciturn when asked.

"It's like watching Howard all over again," Peggy pointed out, speaking around the stylus she held between her teeth as she flipped through Sam's latest email. Just because the Avengers had to focus on finding the scepter didn't mean either of them had completely given up on finding Bucky. Currently Sam Wilson was in Canada, investigating some local reports about a one-armed hermit who supposedly lived in a wildlife preserve. "Absolutely insufferable whenever he's got an idea. He'll reemerge when he's worked it out."

Steve leaned over the back of the couch, sweeping his fingers down her arm as he stooped to read over her shoulder. "It's not the vanishing act that worries me," he confessed ruefully. "It's the aftermath of whatever idea he's got cooking."

Peggy hummed in absent agreement, leaning into his touch even as she smiled at Sam's good-natured grousing about the cold Canadian winter.

The next day, Pepper made a formal appointment to meet with the captain in her office.

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"He wouldn't want to tell you," Pepper told Steve quietly, "but he's been suffering quite a bit of residual nerve pain from the operation site in his chest."

Steve set his teeth, pacing off a loose square in the middle of Pepper's office floor. "How long?"

Pepper hesitated, and he knew he wouldn't like the answer. Her spine was very straight, but her eyes were tired, and she had slipped her heels off behind the safety of her desk. "I'm not exactly sure, but it's been several months. Bruce invited Helen Cho here to take a look, see what could be done. She's a specialist in…"

"Synthetic-organic interfaces; I remember." Steve shook his head. "What's that, fake skin?"

"Actually, yes," Pepper tapped on her screen, turning it to show him a set of computer generated images. "The idea is to create simulacra of tissue cells using a variation of 3D printing technology. Doctor Cho is a genius - she invented the procedure herself."

Steve took the tablet into his hand, flipping through the images. "Will it work? Will she just make him new nerves or something?"

The muscles tightened around Pepper's eyes. "She's never actually tried it outside an experimentally controlled situation. And no, no new nerves. Right now she's pretty much confined to repairs of the epidermal layer. Someday though, maybe in fifty years, she hopes to be able to do more delicate internal work, even create new organs."

There was a misty look in the woman's eyes, and Steve nodded quietly, handing the tablet back. "So she'll fix his skin, then."

Pepper nodded. She had explained to him the finer points of neuropathy, and how the damaged skin nerves shot tingling waves of pain through Tony's chest at even the lightest touch. Hopefully this procedure would insulate and protect the nerves in question, preventing them from further irritation.

"When is all this going down?" Steve's voice was carefully level. Pepper sighed and scraped back her hair from her face, twisting it into a bun with a pencil. With a back corner of her mind, she made a mental note to replace it with a nice clip before the teleconference with Hong Kong in a few hours.

"A day or so," she finally admitted. "They've been setting up in Bruce's lab. I thought you should know before things go any further."

Steve nodded his thanks and turned to go, but Pepper saw the flinty look in his eye and flew around the edge of her desk, stopping him with a hand on his arm.

"Go easy on him," she urged, and felt him soften slightly. "He - he's had a lot of trust issues, and he was afraid to tell anybody for fear he'd get kicked off the team."

"A team's only a team as far as it acts like one," the captain told her quietly, but she knew he would take her words into consideration.

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Steve didn't usually go into the labs, so his sudden appearance was enough to let Tony know that the game was up. Still, he played it for all he was worth.

"Hey, long time no see, Cap!" he greeted, as though he hadn't seen the captain that very morning. "What brings you down here?"

Steve didn't answer for a minute, brushing past the billionaire and moving toward the long, low table in the middle of the room. Doctor Cho looked up from an adjustment she was making to one of the panels, and smiled, eyes hopefully flickering behind him. Thor wasn't there, so she returned to her work, biting her lip absently.

"Nice setup you got here," the captain remarked at last, casually. He gestured to the partially completed arch over the table, the mess of wiring that Bruce Banner was methodically untangling. "What do you call it?"

Pleased at being asked about her work, Helen Cho raised her head again, completely missing Tony's frantic hand motions behind the captain's back. "It's a travel version of my regeneration cradle," she explained. "We are installing it to perform some trials on neuropathic tissue."

Behind the captain, Tony smacked his forehead in frustration. Steve merely nodded pleasantly, continuing his self-guided tour further into the lab, away from the others. For lack of something better to do, Tony trailed behind.

"Look, Cap," he started, not quite sure where he was going to go with the sentence, but then Steve stopped and turned around. The captain took a long look over his shoulder at the regeneration cradle, and then an equally long look at his friend - and then reached into his pocket and pulled out a flat, brightly colored envelope.

"Here," he said, holding it out.

Tony hesitated and then reached for it as if he thought it might explode. "What is this, a resignation?"

Steve didn't smile. "It's a get well card. I heard about your upcoming procedure. Would have liked you to have told me yourself, but I suppose that's your business."

The card was a goofy one, featuring a child with a handful of balloons, cheerfully assuring the reader that they would surely be feeling better soon. Steve had embellished it with great care, adding Pepper's signature ponytail and facial expression to the child's head and including some of Tony's robots in the background.

Stark blinked. He had not expected this. "So, you're not mad?"

"No," the captain answered, and his face was very grave. "I'm disappointed though. We're a team, Stark. If one of us isn't at maximum capacity, I need to know, or it could put the others in danger."

Ouch. Tony winced inwardly. Steve turned toward the door, but paused.

"Get feeling better," he said sincerely. "Let me know if I can help."

He was gone then, leaving Tony standing in the middle of the room with the card still in his hand. Flipping it open at last, he paused, surprised and a little bit touched. The inside of the card featured a carefully drawn Iron Man in a hospital bed, with Peggy and the Avengers crowded around. Each one had signed it, and across the bottom Steve had scrawled a few words.

The team's got your back, Tony.

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So yes - Bruce went to Korea to get Dr. Cho, who he's been corresponding with for a while now. I can't remember - did anybody guess that?

The idea of using tissue regeneration to insulate damaged nerves isn't actually as farfetched as it sounds. There are already medical operations and procedures that try to wrap or swathe damaged nerves in tissue to keep them from being irritated.

Also: is it just me, or is the image of Thor cheerfully posing with groups of tourists a delightful one?

Have a great week, you all!