A/N: Please read and review!
Tony and Bruce were going to leave when Tony's phone went off. For a moment, he looked concerned and didn't want to answer the phone, but he eventually did. He was only able to say one word before he quickly walked over to me, holding his phone a far away from his ear. I could hear a woman's voice still talking loudly.
"It's for you," Tony said, quickly placing the phone in my hand. He wasn't going to deal with whatever my grandma wanted on his own.
"What?" I mouthed at him as I placed my phone up to my ear. "Hello?"
"Rebecca," my grandma's voice almost bellowed at me. I also had to pull the phone away from my ear a little. She always talked loudly on the phone. "Would you also like to explain why you're in New York and not at school?"
"Um. . ." I was saying, noticing that the rest of them were giving me a strange look, so I quickly walked away from them. "People needed my help?"
"That's my phone. . ." Tony was saying, and I made some kind of gesture with one of my hands for him not to worry about it.
She was quiet for a moment, thinking, and it was pretty unsettling. She was always planning something new and different.
"Are you out of earshot?" She asked me.
I looked to the others, feeling it was safe to say anything more. "Yeah."
"Good," she told me. "I assume Tony managed to read very secret files?"
"Yeah," I told her. "And, Steve looked through some secret crates."
And, I told what we found. She was silent the longer I talked, and I could tell she was not happy about what she was hearing. It was one thing to suspect that something nefarious was happening within the organization, but it was another to have the proof. That was the real reason why she left active duty for S.H.I.E.L.D.
"I was afraid of that," she said when I finished. She stopped being serious for a moment. "Was. . .that. . .?"
I looked back at Steve, smiling a little. "Yeah. They finally found him. Why?"
"Ed saw the news during lunch when he came to the bank," she told me. "He wants to talk to him."
"Yeah," I said absentmindedly as I walked towards Steve. I pulled the phone away from my ear, so my grandma wouldn't hear what I was saying to him. "My great-grandpa wants to speak to you."
He looked like he was both trying to keep himself from agreeing and wanting to along and talk with him.
"When you're ready," I told him.
"I do. . ." He said. "Sometime."
I quickly went back to talking to my grandma. "Yeah. . .sometime soon. He'd talk to him, but we've got to give him time."
She agreed with me and hung up, and I gave it back to Tony, trying to say some kind of thanks and for apologizing for that, but it was still pretty confusing that the call even happened.
"Why would my grandma even have your number?" I asked him.
He shrugged. "Your grandfather does. That was something a couple years ago. Actually. . .it was Pepper who mostly spoke with the,."
I walked away from him as he started to leave with Bruce. Oddly enough, I hung back to be around Steve.
My great-grandpa always told us stories about him, and he would always say:
"A true leader was measured by one thing. It's the ability to reign in a group of people with different goals and personalities for that one important goal, and he would place them where their strengths would do the most good."
That's what Steve did. I could begin to respect him even more which was rare when I dealt with an Outsider (basically anyone who has no family or connections to my part of Iowa).
At that point, I couldn't really say anything to him. My shyness, my curse, really kicked in, and I couldn't really look him in the eyes if we talked. . .or kind of talked. I might have responded with a few single syllable words a few times if he was lucky.
I think he had enough of that, and he rested one of his hands on my shoulder and gently had me looking up at him. It took all the strength and willpower I had to look him directly in the eyes.
"You shouldn't be second guessing yourself like that," he quietly told me. "At least not when you're around me."
That was all he really said, then, but there was something about it that would always stick with me. It would shape everything I would later become.
"Yeah. . ." I kind of said back at him, and I was only looking over his shoulder. There was no way I could even continue to look into his eyes for that long. Of course, he noticed that too.
"You should probably try to look someone in the eyes when you talk to them," he was quietly telling me, and he gently had me look into his eyes. His hands were quickly pulled away from me, not wanting to step some kind of line.
He would have sound kinda bossy when he said that, but it wasn't like that at all. It's the way he said that. It had to do with the way he said it. He was very earnest and genuine, making that not even seem like an order, more of a suggestion that would make my life much easier than ever before.
"Good luck to get me to talk if I tried to do that," I ended up replying to him.
He shook his head, not wanting to accept that no matter how many times I would tell him that.
"What?" I asked him, knitting my eyebrows together in confusion.
"Nothing," he ended up saying, not really sounding too happy about that. He hid it well, though. I got to give him some credit.
That was when we all should have went our separate ways. We all had our own lives to get back to, but we would assemble again in the moment the world would need us again.