So... a couple days... yeah I'm a lying liar who lies. Sorry about that, I got distraction by various things. But new chapter! And working on the next one even now :)
To the Americans out there, enjoy your Independence Day!
Part Three: In Which
Chapter Six: Steve Tries to watch Dr Who
"What's with little toes?" Are the first words out of Harry's mouth when he sits beside Steve at the kitchen bench with an oversized mug of tea- the one that says 'I've got a honky tonk badonkadonk' that had been a gag present from Darcy.
Steve- still not entirely used to some of his housemate's(?) random thought processes- snorts into his coffee, "What?"
"Well, they're so pointless. Why do they even bother growing?"
He looks down at his bare feet self-consciously, "I don't think they're pointless."
Harry rolls his eyes, "They are! And toenails! On little toes! They're just so stupid- I don't get it; some of them look like they've already given up on life anyway- why don't they just fall off?"
He shrugs at the pondering wizard. This wasn't the first time he'd asked deep, 'philosophical' questions like these out of the blue, and likely wouldn't be the last either, "Evolution is weird, I guess."
"You're bloody right about that. And underarm hair! Don't you think it's a waste of resources? Like, couldn't our bodies have spent the energy growing pointless hair somewhere else? What's its purpose- and don't you say anything Bruce Banner-" he waves a hand threateningly at the scientist that had just appeared. Steve shrugs helplessly at the other man, "I want an honest, ignorant answer from the Captain of Patriotism and the American way."
"Is this for a Vine?" Clint asks from the coffee percolator Tony had bought especially for him when he discovered the archer preferred cheap and nasty coffee. He hadn't wanted 'that nasty shit contaminating the good stuff, you filthy pleb'.
Harry and Steve frown in confusion, "What's a Vine?" they ask in unison.
Clint shakes his head, and has the look of someone forced to explain algebra to a third grader, "It's like… oh I don't know; Jarvis?"
"According to Urban Dictionary, Vines are short videos, usually 5 to 10 seconds long of compiled clips. They are frequently posted on social websites for their comedic value."
Harry blinks slowly over the rim of his tea mug. A wicked smile creeps across his face, which pretty much sets the tone for the rest of Steve's day.
Steve's been watching Harry flit through the sky of Manhattan for the last thirty minutes.
He's only partly watching, really. Harry moves too fast through the air for him to catch anything more than a passing glimpse of the man; fragmented visons of the wizard stretched out over his broom, a look of wicked joy upon his too-young face. He wonders how he's keeping warm up there; early January isn't known for its balmy temperatures. Today is hardly the exception- though the sky is a clear, uninterrupted blue and the sun on his face is a peaceful warmth, there's a biting wind that cuts through clothing like a hot knife through butter (though perhaps in this case the simile worked the other way 'round). He doesn't want to think about how cold it must be zooming through it at a million miles an hour.
He shivers at the thought.
It's taken Steve some time, but he's learnt gradually that he's not as bothered by the cold as people think he must be. That first winter- the first cold season he'd faced in this brave new world- people seemed to think that he'd freak out, as though the seventy years of being unconsciously trapped in a block of ice had somehow transferred to his inactive mind (as though that would bother him more than the thought of all the people he had lost). It hadn't, but with so many people wondering if he was okay- if he was warm enough, and did he want another coat?- he'd almost started thinking that he must not have been.
The season had not been a good one- the ill-placed concerns left him off-balance and unsure in a world he already wasn't entirely sure about. Maybe he wasn't okay (he still isn't), maybe the cold was having an effect on him. He'd started having nightmares; landing the plane in the water, the water surrounding him in an embrace so cold it burnt then felt like nothing at all, turning to ice before he could move and filling his lungs- his veins- with blue and sinking down into the depths of a bottomless ocean.
Then spring came- and summer. People stopped caring. He started seeing a shrink- it helped- and the discomfort he'd felt the previous winter didn't return with the browning of the leaves and the fall in temperature. He still had nightmares- not always, but often enough- but now they were of being stuck, and trapped. The sense of helplessness- of hopelessness- he'd felt in the last week of the war was what haunted him now. It was that sensation that left his skin crawling- not the cold.
He enjoyed it now. It didn't affect him as much as it used to, for one- Lord knows he ran hotter than he used to. It was nice to enjoy the cool, crisp air, without fearing that this winter would be his last. He spends a lot of his time out here in the winter- sketching the skyline, coming to terms with the way the world looked in the new millennium. He must have drawn the sleek lines of the Chrysler building (a reminder of the old) a million times over now, but he's yet to grow tired of it.
On a whim, he scribbles in the fleeting image of Harry; a small speck in the sky- like a bird with one too many limbs before he moves onto sharpening the lines of another building. Harry lands not long after, a broad grin stretched across his face. His hair is even more of a disaster than usual.
"Have fun?"
"The best." Harry moves forwards, peering down at the half-completed sketch. He smiles, "You've got talent. Should sell them- people would pay a pretty penny to stick an artwork by Captain America on their wall."
Steve grimaces as the other man throws himself onto an adjacent chair. He twitches his wrist and the gas heater between them ignites, "I thought about it- I could make a lot of money for charity… but people would be buying art for art's sake, you know? They wouldn't be buying it because it was good, or beautiful. They'd just want to stick a piece of the Captain on their walls.
"It doesn't sit right- I was a dancing monkey for a long time. It's not something I want to do again."
Harry leans back to stare at the sky. He chews on his lip for a moment, "When the war ended, I was offered a contract with Puddlemere United- they're a pretty big quidditch team. I was pretty good in school, but I hadn't played in over a year. It was pretty clear to me that they weren't asking because of any talent I may have had. All they wanted was the Boy-Who-Lived, and all of the notoriety that came with it. So I get it. Really."
Steve watches Harry watching the sky, "What was it like? Growing up with that?"
Harry snorts softly, "Pretty screwed up. Looking back on it now, it was bloody awful- everything I did was scrutinized, and I seemed to switch from being a saviour figure to point of ridicule in the blink of an eye. There was never any easy ground for me… but for all that, it was still the best thing to ever happen to me. If I'd have stayed with the Dursley's any longer than I had to…" he makes a face and clutches at his elbows, "Eventually I'd have started believing everything they called me. I'd probably be dead or stuck in prison; ending up displaced in an alternate reality is the lesser of two evils, really."
Steve smiles, but there's a tugging in his chest that feels a lot like loss, "I'd probably have died the first winter Bucky left for the war."
Harry rolls his head to regard him, and Steve doesn't bother to pretend he'd drawing, "He was your mate, right? The one that fell."
He swallows back the sudden onslaught of emotion that comes with memories of the train (even now, they hurt, but at least they were not accompanied by the rawness of losing everything). "Yeah," he grits out, "he was."
Harry frowns- a faint creasing of his forehead and the narrowing of his bottle green eyes, "Sorry. That was insensitive, wasn't it?"
"It's okay." He shrugs, staring down at his cityscape as though he could escape through there, "It's been almost three years now."
Harry breathes heavily through his nose and they both stare out at the city below, "We're both kind of stranded here, aren't we."
He smiles sardonically, "It could be worse."
The wizard gives another breathy sigh, "It could." He's silent a long moment, before slapping his hands on his thighs, dragging them down the denim as he collects his emotions, "I think that's enough deep and meaningful conversation for this time of the morning."
Steve snorts and glances pointedly down at his watch, "It's barely eleven."
"My point exactly. Ugh." He pulls a face of mock disgust, "I think I need a cup of tea the size of a bucket now."
Steve is opening his mouth to say something else as they stand when he hears the high-pitched whine of the thrusters of Tony's suit. They blink in surprise as Tony lands on the balcony. Steve hadn't even been aware he'd been out- certainly not in his armour. They stand around awkwardly as his armour is pulled off him in a whir of machinery and engineering.
"Tony." He greets the older man cautiously.
Tony gives them a tired look, "Hey." He says amongst the background noise of his suit packing away.
"Where you been?"
Tony glares at him half-heartedly, but Steve stands his ground. He doesn't care if he's falling into the nagging stereotype Tony's slotted him into; as a friend and colleague he had a duty to know of his safety, and where needed to offer his help.
Tony sighs and scratches at the back of his head, "Jarvis found a remnant warehouse full of old Hammer weapons that had been lined up to be sold off to extremist groups in the Middle East."
Steve's eyebrows rise in surprise, though honestly it should be that shocking, really (he may not have been around when the whole thing happened, but he'd heard enough about it). Hammer Industries may be a dead company, but it had been producing weapons for long enough to have more than a few stockpiles left over.
"Is that the last one?"
Stark shrugs and moves past them into the indoors and the kitchen. Steve and Harry follow him, "Hopefully. They managed to wipe all their servers before I could get to it, but I'm hoping J can at least find something."
He takes in the tired lines of Tony's face, and the troubled way he plays with a pen lying on the kitchen bar (probably one of Bruce's), twirling it through his fingers like he wants to be buried in his lab tearing something apart and building it up from scratch. It's what Howard would have done.
"Are you going to be okay?" he asks carefully.
Tony rolls his eyes- hard. "It's fine. It's just- it's been four years- more or less. Hammer's been locked up for four years and I should have known better than to think I'd managed to sweep it all away. I guess I should be glad it's not Stark tech."
Harry shifts beside him and Steve decides it's best not to push any further right now- not whilst Tony's still so keyed up. Steve's found his way slowly and carefully into this new world, but he knows his teammates and he knows his friends.
"If you need any help, you know we're here, right?"
Tony grimaces and disappears under the bench to retrieve a bottle of whiskey. Steve pushes down his disapproval, "I know that."
"Do you? Whatever this ends up being, it doesn't have to be another disaster like Thor and Greenwich."
Tony steps on his way to the elevator and Steve tries his hardest not to think about how ridiculous the billionaire looks in his undersuit and a bottle of hooch in hand, "I know that, Cap."
"We're a team, Tony. And I'll kick your ass if you get yourself killed."
Stark waves his bottle as he steps into the elevator, "I'll keep that in mind."
The doors close and Harry breathes out heavily, "Hermione mentioned something about Tony and Hammer about two weeks ago. Said he'd gone off to bust a weapon's stash- came back in a foul mood."
Steve hums, eyeing the closed metal doors, "So that's not the first time."
"At least it's only the second? Probably?"
He huffs, "I'll talk to him about it tomorrow. Jarvis, is Hermione in?"
A momentary pause, "Yes, Captain Rogers. She is in her laboratory. Would you care to speak with her?"
He shakes his head, forgetting (once again) that Jarvis is just an AI, "Can you send her to Tony? When she's able."
"Message received, Captain. She will meet with him shortly."
Beside him, Harry snorts and shoves him jovially in the shoulder (Steve lets himself be moved by the smaller man. He's pretty sure Harry knows he lets him do it), "You sly devil. Don't think I don't know what you did right there."
He sends the Brit a guileless look of innocence, "I don't know what you're talking about."
The wizard rolls his eyes and shakes his head, "So I didn't just witness Captain America sending my best friend into Stark's lab in an attempt at distracting him from the bottle? Most likely with her body, I might add."
He fights to maintain the look, "Now why on Earth would you think that? Captain America is a paragon of virtue. He would never do something so underhanded."
(It's a dirty, stinking lie. Steve is not above playing sneaky to stop Tony from ending up blind drunk. God knows his liver needed the break)
Harry looks like he's thinking exactly the same thing. Steve clears his throat, inching over to the kitchen (he's hungry; again). Harry laughs and rolls his eyes again, "Yeah alright, Mister Bottomless-Pit. I could have sworn you ate just an hour ago."
"I'm a growing boy?"
"You can only use that excuse so many times until it gets old, Rogers."
He shrugs and rummages through the fridge to hide his grin, "I've a fast metabolism thanks to an experimental procedure I probably should have thought harder about?"
(Another lie. If he'd been asked to undergo the serum again, he'd have signed up without a thought a million times over)
Harry snorts as he pulls out a bread knife and a cutting board, "A-bloody-men to that. Now hand me that jar; I wanna drown my sorrows in pickles."
"So Hermione and I were thinking of doing some duelling tomorrow." Harry says at dinner one night, sometime in early January. Most of them are there- though Hermione and Tony are conspicuously absent, and Malfoy's been away the last three days ('bumming around in New Zealand', according to Harry).
He tilts his head, grinning, "Yeah? You found a place then?"
Harry nods, "About a week back. Hermione and I have checked it out- it suits our needs."
"Where?" Natasha asks, in that quiet purring way of hers.
"Canada."
To his left, Bruce chokes on his rice, "Canada?" He rasps when he gets his food down, "Christ, it must be ten degrees there!"
Harry shrugs, "It's isolated and uninhabited. I thought it was ideal- and the cold meant less wildlife to disturb."
Steve hums and shovels a forkful of paella into his mouth. It's buttery and spiced just right. He's had the need to fight itching under his skin for weeks now- it's been over a month since SHIELD last had need for him and the down time has left him restless, "Can we join?"
Harry grins at him wickedly, "I was planning on it."
Steve swallows; he gets the distinct impression that tomorrow is going to be both very enlightening, and very painful.
Steve wakes from the clutches of a nightmare with sweat on his brow and blankets twisted around his legs.
He sighs into the cool night air, irritation and aching nostalgia washing over him in equal measure as his heartrate calms and the adrenalin ebbs. He doesn't bother trying to go back to sleep- though the digital clock on his bedside table reads three fifty-eight. Nights like these leave him keyed-up and restless, and the thought of lying still and submitting himself to the ache the dream brought on in an attempt to fall back to sleep makes him feel almost nauseous. He rolls out of bed, changing into sweatpants and his favourite workout shirt and makes his way down to the gym on the 88th floor. Jarvis lights the way for him- soft illumination of the empty halls and elevator- but says nothing. Nights like these happen enough for him to know the drill.
He contents himself for several hours on a souped-up treadmill, and the steady pounding of his feet washes away his thoughts and memories, leaving him in a blank kind of sub-space that he only exits when the churning of his empty stomach becomes too insistent to ignore anymore. He leaves the gym feeling lighter, his legs almost shaky, like they still think they should be running.
Bruce is already in the living area, absently shovelling spoonfuls of muesli into his mouth as he reads something with lots of numbers and graphs on it on a StarkTab. It's still dark, outside the floor to ceiling windows.
"Morning." He greets, moving to the breakfast fridge to pull out five eggs, half a dozen sausages and several rashers of bacon. Bruch watches him gather his unholy amount of food with that funny sort of academic appreciation he gets with a lot of people in the tower. Like Jarvis he doesn't comment, even though Steve's up an hour earlier than he usually is and is assembling enough protein to feed a family for his breakfast. He's seen it happen enough times to know what it means. They all do, he's sure.
"Morning." He echoes, and eyes the sausages Steve throws in the pan with something akin to envy. Steve pulls another two from the fridge and Bruce smiles self-depreciatingly.
"Thanks… Are you looking forward to today?"
"Yeah." He looks up, "You comin' along?"
Bruce makes a moue of distaste, "It's mid-winter, and Canada's not really known for its balmy temperatures."
"The Hulk doesn't seem to be bothered by the cold."
The look on Bruce's face grows even more pronounced- even now, he's still not entirely bringing the Hulk out to play, "That is true." He hedges, and subsequently buries himself in his cup of cold coffee.
Natasha turns up next- like clockwork at 0615. She says nothing about his large breakfast (no one ever does); only making her traditional Tuesday blueberry porridge. Harry and Hermione wander in sometime after seven- Steve's already finished his breakfast by then, and is content to pass the time watching Dr Who on Netflix (he blames Harry and Darcy for that one).
Harry joins him on the couch, balancing toast slathered with an ungodly amount of jam on his knees, "Hey."
He smiles, in part amused by the jam, and his tousled, fluffy hair that looks like he lost a fight with a hairdryer, "Morning."
"Looking forward to today?"
He grins at the Doctor on screen- in the middle of ignoring Martha's transparent attempts at flirting, "You bet." He's never seen Harry or Hermione fight- not in the whole four months he's known them. Most of the reasoning for that of course has been the involvement of SHIELD- in part because of their wariness of the organisation, as well as the bargain Hermione had drawn up with them. But with their probation well and truly over, he's surprised they haven't gone out earlier.
Harry chuckles through a mouthful of toast, "Looking forward to wiping the floor with you lot."
Steve raises a brow and crosses his arms, giving the wizard the side-eye- he just catches his eyes on his shoulders before they flick back up to meet his, "Is that how it is, then?"
"Yup. That's exactly how it is," Harry takes another bite of his jam-with-toast, all unconvincing wide-eyed innocence.
"Six against two- that ain't great odds."
Harry shrugs, "We've had worse. And I think you're forgetting one vital thing here."
"Oh? Can't think of what that'd be."
"We have magic, you berk."
"That's true. But we fought Loki and came out on top."
Harry's face darkens minutely, and he takes another bite of jam and toast to hide the reaction, "I don't know mate, from what I hear, he didn't exactly put up much of a fight." Steve holds his tongue, because for all they really know, he had been. For the most part Loki had relied on others to do his dirty work, "Kind of convinced that he wanted to fail, to be honest. 'Cause that guy… he is literally thousands of years old. He has more tricks up his sleeve than a- than an old lady in a liquor store."
"I- what?"
"He has a lot of tricks up his sleeve-"
"What does an old lady in a liquor store have to do with anything?"
"We're getting off topic here. What I'm saying is, he's been studying magic for a millennia longer than out combined lifespans. You really think if he actually tried, he wouldn't have provided more of a challenge to you guys?"
Steve shifts in his seat, looking down at the cup of joe in his hands, "I can't deny he'd have been more of a challenge if that is the case, but" he lowers his voice and leans closer, "that doesn't change the fact that Loki is insane. Even in our green state back then, he'd have slipped up, and we- or whoever else woulda stepped up to the plate- would've found a way to beat him."
Harry grimaces and brushes the crumbs off his legs, "Oh, he's nuts alright. But I kind of got the sense that he's playing for a bigger game than any of us could hope to understand." A shadow crosses his face and his right hand clenches, "What his endgame is, is beyond me; can only hope it won't go call for a sacrificial lamb."
Steve gets the very real sense Harry's talking from experience there. He watches in detached interest as Shakespeare's Globe is consumed by a swirling whirlpool of mist. He'll have to re-watch this episode.
"Harry! What are you doing talking to the enemy!" Hermione exclaims. Harry twists around in his seat to look up at her.
"He's not the enemy yet, Hermione."
The corner of her lip twitches, "Even so. I was hoping we could speak strategy before we go." Harry nods and stands, moving to stand beside her.
Steve puts on a face of mock outrage as they turn to leave, "Hey now, that's cheating!"
Harry sends him a rude gesture, "Piss off, Rogers. If you had any sense you lot'd be doing the same. 'Mione and I don't mess around with amateurs."
Steve laughs at the pair's retreating backs. At the sink, Natasha has an uncanny gleam in her eyes at the thought, "We'll see how good you are by the end of the day, Potter."
"Whatevs man. Be ready in ten."
The elevator doors close and suddenly Natasha is standing in front of him, face all but inscrutable but for the eager gleam she allows into her eyes (it's as close to glee as he's ever seen her).
"Strategy, Cap?"
He breathes out heavily and pauses Netflix.
Definitely going to have to re-watch the episode later.
Alternate way Harry and Steve's friendly ribbing could have gone:
"Okay, but I have a Hermione."
"… We have a Natasha."