Steve Rogers fights a war and works damn hard to do it. He gives it everything he has, and then it takes a little bit more without his permission. He lets it happen. In fact, he goes to historically unprecedented lengths to make it so when he volunteers for the Super Soldier program.
Steve gives his body for the experiment and comes out of it feeling like a stranger in his own skin. He has memories of Bucky being unbalanced after growth spurts but his friend had never broken a car door with lack of coordination. Also, Bucky never grew ten inches and a hundred pounds of muscle in under three minutes.
Of course there are benefits.
He's spent the last twenty-four years of his life almost constantly sick. Now he couldn't catch a cold if he spent an entire week inhaling germs on purpose. He only finds out what really and actually breathing feels like on that fateful day in 1944. Steve is finally strong enough to fight any bully he chooses.
Funny how so few of them seem to want to try now that he's tall enough that they have to look him in the eye.
That doesn't really matter though because Steve isn't interested in fighting neighborhood bullies now. No. The enemy he picks is based in Berlin and marching through Europe with guns and tanks and attempting to pulverize everything in the way using fear and intimidation.
Steve doesn't like bullies.
Hitler is the biggest bully he can possibly find.
Initially there's a problem though, and that problem is that ever since he can remember, there's never been a bully Bucky hasn't backed him against. He's always been there just over his shoulder. Bucky'll tell him not to start some of those fights. He'll say it's a bad idea or tell him not to get involved, but he's always there when the fight starts regardless.
Going to rescue him when he's taken prisoner isn't even a question. It's a forgone conclusion what he's going to do. Peggy helps him instead of trying to convince him not to go and that might be the moment Steve gets properly started on falling in love with her.
The complicated thing about war is the way some of your best ever memories form right in the middle of oceans of violence and suffering. It's not something that can be explained to someone who hasn't experienced it. Steve experiences it.
Forming the Howling Commandos gives him a purpose and a team. For the first time he discovers that he's a good leader without trying. It's not something he reaches for. He finds the best and most honorable people he possibly can and tells them what he wants to do. He makes a plan and shares it honestly and for some reason he can barely fathom himself, the people he most wants to follow him do.
Howard Stark is eccentric and overblown and likes to pretend that he's helping the army for the money or because he's bored. Underneath all of that, there's a man who wants to make a difference and leave a legacy of something besides affairs with starlets and innovative weapon production. He's unrelentingly supportive of the Commandos as a unit and Steve doesn't have any proof, but he thinks the man may have funded their missions out of his own pocket more than once.
Morita astounds him with the strength of his convictions and determination. He's here fighting with them while his entire family is in an internment camp back in California. Jones always has a smile no matter how dark things are and with his eight languages, can almost literally talk to anyone. Dum Dum, Falsworth, and Dernier bring their own expertise to the table and balance out the group dynamic with their own unique personalities.
Peggy is- God. Steve doesn't have the words to do Peggy, or what she means to him, any kind of justice. Honestly, he probably never will.
Bucky is there at his side, at his shoulder, on a ridge keeping his path clear with a specialized rifle. He keeps Steve safe and grounded. Like he always has. Even in the middle of a war with people dying every day, Steve never doubts that he always will.
Then comes the day with the train and Dr. Zola. The day everything goes wrong and he's forces to watch helplessly as his best friend in the world, his brother of choice and only remaining family, falls to his death.
When he looks back on it, Steve knows that that isn't actually the worst day of his life. That day will come later.
From in the middle of it though…
Yes, that is the worst day he's ever lived through.
People should be less surprised than they are that he crashes a plane in to the ocean to destroy the Tesseract once and for all and keep a bomb from destroying New York. It's the entire mission. Keep the Nazis and HYDRA from getting the pieces they need. The Tesseract is the most critical piece there is.
This is his choice.
It's the mission.
Bucky was always responsible for his sense of self-preservation and Bucky's dead.
Steve doesn't mind dying for his mission.
The fact that the crash doesn't actually kill him actually kind of pisses him off. He blacks out when the plane impacts and he thinks that's that. Surely this blackness must be permanent?
It's not.
Being dead can't possibly hurt this much. His skin is so cold his nerves have completely given up and now he feels like he's been set on fire. There's ice in his hair and his eyelashes are almost frozen shut. It doesn't help that he's sitting in nearly eight inches of frozen water.
Every inch of his body hurts, but he manages to pull himself out of the pilot's chair and practically crawls to the back of the plane. The angle the plane is at means that this part of the plane is dry. He's no warmer, but he isn't swimming through ice anymore.
Eventually he starts to feel warm again and knows far in the back of his mind that warmth and tiredness are two of the major signs that hypothermia is setting in. Caring very much about that fact is outside of his mental capacity. His entire body is in pain and all he wants at the moment is to be able to pass out and not feel it anymore.
The moment when everything goes black isn't entirely discernable. What's important is that it happens. Even if it's after an eternity of waiting. Finally, everything is just gone and fuzzy and just too plain numb for him to feel or care.
If this is death, he really doesn't mind it.
…..
…..
Then he wakes up.
His eyes don't open immediately. What comes back to him first is his sense of touch. That's all fine. The material his clothes are made out of fit well enough that they aren't too tight and also don't feel absurdly loose. He's lying on something soft. Maybe too soft.
Next is hearing. From somewhere up above him there's a steady thwump, thwump, thwump. There's a baseball game that comes with all of the crackling interference typical to a radio broadcast. Not exactly what he'd expect to hear in heaven but who's he to argue? He likes baseball as much as the next guy and hey, it's not like he's ever been dead before. Nowhere in the multiple times he was given last rites did anyone mention what the soundtrack in heaven was supposed to be. For all he knows, a recorded baseball game he watched live for the first time with his best friend is it.
Then his sense of smell comes back and that's really when he starts thinking something must definitely be wrong. He can't smell anything. Well no, that's not right. He can smell things, just not what he might expect. It's all laundry detergent, soap, and the recycled air smell that has forever and always been present in any doctor's office he's ever visited. Which, for the record, is a lot.
Finally, his eyes open. There's a simple rotator fan on the ceiling pushing air through the room generating the sound he'd noticed. There's a wireless on a small table by the wall generating the baseball game. The entire space is clinically impersonal and could be any hospital or army base he's ever been on.
What he can't hear, see, or smell is traffic, doors slamming, or any kind of evidence at all that there is anyone else alive within a mile of where he is. That's when the redheaded woman comes in to the room wearing a good approximation of an army uniform. Apart from the fact that her hair is down not up like it should be and she's wearing a men's tie.
Then she tries to lie to him.
No one in the vicinity should be surprised when he breaks through the wall.
These people researched him for Christ's sake. They've apparently had seventy years to figure out his life story and personality. What part of any of the information on him available for public consumption has ever made anyone think that dishonesty is the way to go when dealing with him?
Those thoughts actually only come later. All he's thinking about at the moment is the fact that he has no idea what's going on, who the people around him are, and more generally what the ever loving fuck is going on. This is panic. Plain and simple.
He nearly knocks someone over in his mad dash down a street that's too busy and too full of people and vehicles that don't make any sense. The person is small and definitely female from general stature and voice. Distantly he's thankful that she doesn't go sprawling on to the ground and get hurt because then he would have felt panicked and like an asshole and his mental and emotional faculties aren't up to handling both at once.
He forgets about the girl quickly. Truth be told, he forgets about a lot of things pretty quickly in the next thirty seconds. He does this because twenty-three seconds later, Steve is staring at a city he doesn't recognize.
All of his senses are pitched head long in to free fall. Words and images flash at him from boards from three hundred and sixty degrees. Horns are honking and people are all taking too, and over, and around each other and all of it is bouncing off of buildings that are so damned tall looking at their tops makes him feel dizzy. It's as much an alien planet to Steve as the surface of Mars.
The man who later tells him that his name is Fury finds him seconds later. He tells Steve a lot of horrific things made even worse by the fact that according to all available evidence, they're true. He tells Steve that he's been asleep and missed almost seventy years.
Seventy years where the world kept turning.
Seventy years where everyone Steve knew and cared about grew old and died.
Fury tells Steve that history remembers him, remembers Captain America, as a hero.
Steve feels sick.
He goes where they tell him to go. He answers the medical and psychological questions they ask him. He takes the history books they hand to him and sits in the apartment they show him to read them instead of sleeping.
Steve can read faster since the serum. For one thing, the words never blur in front of him and he never has to squint anymore. For another, the way he assimilates knowledge has changed. He takes everything in at top speed, understands the data, and then retains it all.
These were the changes that hadn't been expected when he had been pumped full of serum and blasted with gamma radiation. Erksine had expected physical changes, had been trying to cause them on purpose, there had never been anything found in his notes to indicate he had been toying with the idea of cognitive improvements. He'd died before anybody could tell him what had happened.
So Steve takes in the history as quickly as he can, and the more he reads the more overwhelmed he feels. For two days all he does is read and eat the food SHIELD delivers. When he finishes the books, he requests and receives several boxes of files. Files on Bucky and Peggy, On Dum Dum, Dernier, and Morita.
He doesn't ask for files on Howard. Two of the books had been biographies of him. The contents hadn't been a surprise apart from the bit that mentioned he'd gotten married and had a son. Howard had never seemed like the settling down type.
The files are a bit of a mixed bag. They don't make Steve feel better. Nothing really does that, but they also don't make him feel any worse. His old friends had had lives after him and gone on to finish the war and do good in their lives and Bucky is remembered as a loyal friend and brave hero.
It's as much as Steve had ever wanted for any of them.
But he'd wanted it for himself too.
On day four Steve stops reading and forces himself to try to use some of the new technology around him. Whoever had chosen the apartment he's staying in had clearly done their best to empty it of anything too twenty-first century, but there had been no way of removing some things.
Steve starts with the kitchen because he figures that's the space where the fewest things are likely to have changed besides the bathroom. Not to say that his first shower hadn't been without a few surprises. The hot water allowance alone had taken him by surprise.
He's partly right in his guess that the kitchen won't be hard to figure out. It takes him a minute to get around to the conclusion that he doesn't have to light the burners on the stove with matches, but nothing is much different about the oven. The freezer and the refrigerator aren't unlike the iceboxes he grew up with even if they do work more efficiently than anything he's seen before. The microwave takes a little more time to sus out but doesn't prove to be unworkable.
The biggest stumbling block comes from the dishwasher. Steve can easily see how it would be a useful convenience, but he hasn't got a clue what the different wash cycles are supposed to be or how a person was supposed to load the thing with soap. He washes his dishes in the sink instead.
Steve turns the radiator off as soon as he finds the right button. After the Arctic, Steve's had enough of being cold to last him a lifetime. The fan turns on and off with a pull cord and he'll use that if he starts to boil.
He falls asleep that night and wakes up three hours later gasping. His dreams had been black and cold and full of a screaming howl of noise like a teakettle left to boil, or the wind ripping through empty air. He doesn't go back to sleep.
Instead, Steve gets out of bed and does an endless range of pushups, trying to drown the screeching in his ears with the beat of his own pulse. He can't say it really works, but he keeps at it until the world outside his windows has lightened from black to grey. Then he showers, puts on the clothes that have been left for him including the wallet of cash, and leaves the apartment.
He's been awake for five days. He hasn't felt alive in seventy years.
Stepping out into the city is like jumping into the deep end of a cold swimming pool. It's utterly shocking, completely overwhelming, and yet somehow just a little bit exactly as expected. Either the buildings are in the right place, but are the wrong thing, or they're the businesses he remembers in the wrong buildings. Everything is fifty-feet higher than it should be.
He makes himself walk every inch of it. You can do a lot with your day when you don't spend eight hours of it asleep like everyone else does. Walking the streets of New York city alone at night is not an activity that was particularly advisable in the nineteen-thirties. It's still not particularly advisable now, but now Steve is over six feet tall and can rip sheet metal.
He decides that one of the good things about the future is how many places there are to get a meal and how late they all seem to be open. Steve walks and eats, eats and walks, sits at corner cafes and forces himself to have short conversations with the people waiting the tables, camps out on park benches and sketches pieces of the altered skyline on the edges of napkins and in the margins of newspapers.
One day he takes himself to a cafe near Stark Tower and sits for a while to sketch. He can't put his finger on why, but something about the building very much offends his artistic sensibilities. It's too big and too bulbous and too slickly impersonal and will apparently change the world when Howard's son connects it to an Arc Reactor alternate power generator. All and all, it's a Stark project through and through
That had all been in one of the files that Steve had received from SHIELD, but his technical knowledge of modern engineering hasn't quite gotten caught up with this yet. Howard's son's name is Tony. Tony is forty-five and smarter than his father with just as little self-control. He flies around in a metal suit and is richer than a god and thinks that those things mean he doesn't have to listen to anyone about anything, and that's like Howard too.
In another life, this forty-five year old man named Tony Stark might have grown up calling him Uncle Steve.
In this one, Tony Stark has read about him in a history book and thinks he died seventy years ago like everyone else.
He takes his seat and waits several minutes before anyone comes to take his order. The reason for the delay is quickly explained by a shift change as one waitress is replaced by another. He only notices the change because of a level of situational awareness that kept him alive during the war, and here just makes him extremely conscious of the comings and goings on this particular stretch of sidewalk. Both girls wear the same uniform, one that would be old fashioned or retro now, but shows a surprising amount of skin compared to what he grew up with. They're both blonde, wearing their hair in high twists to keep stray strands out of people's food, and both carry the same notebook and pencil to take down orders.
The first waitress leaves quickly, gracefully picking her way through the tables and out in to the street. She leaves a bag behind the counter and Steve distractedly assumes she might be coming back for a second shift later. He doesn't get a good look at her face.
The new girl takes his order and brings over his danish and cup of coffee with a sweet, but scattered, smile. Her movements leave are efficient and speak of long practice in her job, but don't carry quite the same fluidity as her predecessor. She compliments his sketching and tells him to stay as long as he wants. Apparently no one is waiting for the table and they have "free wifi".
Whatever that is.
She leaves with another smile which Steve makes himself return as well as he can. It's all part of his strategy to practice getting back in to the world. An elderly man at the next table calls him an idiot for not asking her out.
The idea makes the bottom drop out of Steve's chest.
He reads the fifth of the six newspapers he's started taking in everyday. Within three days of doing this, he had to the unpleasant conclusion that everything he wanted changed about the forties is the same and everything he wanted to be changed about the forties is still the same. Governments are still corrupt, people are still sexist and racist, poverty levels are still abysmal, there's something called an ozone layer and the whole in it is a very bad thing caused by people not giving a shit about the planet, and infants and children are dying of treatable diseases because their parents don't want to vaccinate them.
That last one really pisses him off.
Many, many, things do that.
Steve decides that feeling angry is better than numbness or paralysis. Anger is a slow, hot, drip down the back of his throat and in to the pit of his stomach. It's not pleasant, but it's familiar and it lets him know that like it or not, he really isn't dead.
This anger belongs from a time before the war. Before he royally fucked with his own fate by signing up for Project Rebirth. It's the feeling of wanting to fight to fix things, but not knowing who or what to fight, the feeling of being useless and impotent, the feeling of wanting to punch something, anything, and having nothing to punch.
Steve solves that problem by accident by finding Fogwell's Boxing Gym on one of his late night wanderings through Manhattan. The place looks like it hasn't had any kind of overhaul or redecoration in about thirty years. The man behind the desk has to be in his fifties and Steve wouldn't be surprised to find out that he's the original Fogwell.
He takes one long look at Steve, eyes flicking from his head to his toes, and then across the width of his shoulders. "You need gloves?" he asks.
Steve shrugs. He doesn't, even if he manages to bust his knuckles open on one of the bags, the skin will heal before the blood dries, but saying so might make people ask questions. SHIELD doesn't want people doing that yet. "I can tape them."
The man cocks his head. "You got tape?"
"Not exactly," Steve admits. "Got some I can buy?"
The man reaches underneath the counter and comes up with a few sets of rolled up compression bandaged and a new spool of tape and slides both across the counter. "Eight-fifty for the supplies, fifteen an hour for time on the heavy bags. Make sure your shoes are clean before you get out there."
Steve hands him two twenties and takes the tape without another word. The man gestures him towards the locker rooms and goes back to the novel he'd been reading when Steve walked in. Steve sees enough of the cover to see that it's an Agatha Christie. He's glad those are still popular. He'd kept a battered copy of The Body in the Library in his army rucksack across most of Western Europe, a gift from Peggy shoved at him on his way out of base camp to deploy after she'd spent a few days with family.
"Read the whole thing on the train back from leave," she had said crisply. "You may as well have it."
Steve had read most of the book between take off and parachuting in to France for the third time in as many months. Peggy had underlined names and small details in blue pencil, working through the fictional crime as she had read. Steve had made small sketches of the highlighted details and returned the book to her months later "plus illustrations". It had become something of a game between the two of them during the long campaign they'd all fought to beat HYDRA out of Europe.
He wonders whether or not Peggy still has the books, whether she still reads them occasionally, or if they've been packed away in to boxes in her attic with other memories that had no place in family life or building a clandestine agency.
Steve's first punch lands with a satisfying slam, and he stops thinking about it. For the next two hours, he manages to stop thinking about a lot of things.
Needless to say, he goes back to Fogwell's the next night. He hands the same man from behind the counter three twenties this time. Over the course of the next week this pattern only grows until Thursday night when Fogwell simply hands him the keys to the front door and the storage closets and tells him to do what he wants as long as he cleans up and locks the door behind him.
Steve accepts the offer with a polite thank you and sets himself up to burn the night away in the steady rhythm of his fists making hard contact. It's probably a good thing that Fogwell's doesn't have a very strong business stream. Steve hasn't been recognized yet and he has broken open more than one punching bag in the last couple days. He recognizes his mental state and is aware enough of his own strength to know that he'll break more.
This is another thing that regular people might have questions about.
That's where he is when Fury finds him and tells him that the world still needs Captain America, that the world is still full of things he hasn't seen yet. Steve tells him he doubts it. Fury bets him ten dollars that he's wrong.
Steve looses his cash.
He reads the new files he's handed on the team he will be working with and the situation he's flying in too as he's flying in to it. By the time he and Agent Coulson land on the aircraft carrier, he has professional knowledge on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Agents Romanov and Barton, Dr. Banner, and Tony Stark. His knowledge of thermonuclear astrophysics isn't good enough to understand the Tesseract, but he stands by his assessment that he knows what he needs to know.
Everyone would have been better off if it'd been left at the bottom of the ocean.
He finds out from Maria Hill that finding the Tesseract was how they found him. They'd detected the energy signal and locked on. Finding him, waking him up, that had been the price. A part of Steve's mind wonders if the trade had been worth it.
It does not escape Steve's notice that the first thing that SHIELD asks him to do is go back to Germany to capture an invading tyrant. At least this one he does actually get to punch in the face a couple of times. Unfortunately, it's also some kind of super-human (Steve isn't ready to call him a god), so he does actually get punched back.
He doesn't care very much. The threat gets contained. Target acquired and mission accomplished.
On the flight back to the SHIELD carrier they hit weather so bad it makes the whole plane shake. The rattling and buzzing kind of makes Steve want to curl in on himself and scream. A phantom cold-burn feeling skates over his skin and Steve tries to hide it by adjusting his gloves. They came with the new uniform and they're for combat utility not warmth, only covering his palms and leaving his fingers free to preserve dexterity.
Steve looks around at the other occupants of the jet to try to distract himself and notes that he's not the only one uncomfortable in these conditions. For all Loki claims to be a god, the face he's making reminds Steve more of a petulant toddler. On the other hand, it takes a level of confidence to show discomfort without fear. Loki is chained up, restrained, and surrounded by armed opposition.
He should be a hell of a lot more scared than he is.
"What's the matter?" Stark says in a mocking tone, and it takes Steve a moment to realize that Stark isn't talking to him when he says it. It breaks prisoner protocol to engage with a subject outside of a controlled interrogation setting, but Stark isn't a soldier. Steve should strt getting better at remembering that. "Don't like lightning?"
"I'm not overly fond of what follows," Loki replies in the crisp patterns of one of the theater actors Steve saw once on leave with Bucky and Falseworth. Again, Steve thinks that he doesn't sound anything like worried enough. This worry is born out when, not forty seconds later, Loki has been knocked clear out of the plane by a blonde figure who looks straight out of a viking legend complete with red cloak.
Steve's detached impression of this all as some sort of twisted stage play he's watching instead of real life is not improved by this appearance.
Stark jumps out of the plan with no plan and a too-smart mouth, encased in metal plates and buoyed by jet repulsers. Their function is impressive which actually just annoys Steve more because he still doesn't know enough to understand how they work yet and he's honest enough to admit that he has a petty streak with enough color that he doesn't want to be impressed.
They also make him think of things he's rather not remember.
A world fair and a flying car. A pair of tiny brunette girls that Bucky had met four days previous at the corner store and Bucky himself in a brand new olive drab army uniform. A sign asking what a person could give to a war that had already taken everything from so, so, many people...
Steve jumps out of the plane after him. It's only phantom voices and picture-perfect memories in his head that make him take a parachute and his shield out the door with him. Bucky chastises him not to take stupid risks. Peggy tells him that he had better come back alive and a thousand foot drop isn't a good way to go about it.
What am I supposed to be coming back to this time Peg? he thinks. Did Stark build you a time machine while I was out. He's have tried to if you'd asked you know. He always did have a soft spot for you, my fumbling about Fondue not withstanding. Did you ever meet his son? I doubt it. You wouldn't have let Howard get away with keeping you two apart if you'd ever met him, and if you'd been there, maybe he'd be less of an asshole.
The flow of his internal monologue cuts off when Steve lands in the interests of moving quickly and quietly through the undergrowth of the forrest he's landed in. He let's his body take over and follows the sound of raised voices. It's a technique he learned back in forty-four. When searching for a Stark, follow the sounds of annoyance and difficulty. When looking for a fight, try siblings.
He tries to diffuse the situation first, but another thing he should have remembered is that having a Stark in the mix is like adding lighter fluid. Eventually, the fight ends with Thor slamming his hammer in to Steve's shield and a concussive, ringing wave flattening all three of them in addition to several square kilometers of European forrest. Steve wonders if maybe this is what scientists mean when they talk about an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.
"Are we done here?" he asks in to the quiet that follows. No one responds, but the other two move to follow him when he makes his way back up the side of the ravine they've tumbled to the bottom of. Once they have high ground again, Steve indicates to Thor to lead the way to Loki. Thor does so, grumbling the whole time about how the other being has probably up and vanished by now.
It's then both a surprise and not one to find Loki calmly reclining against a boulder. "Are the children you've allied with done squabbling now, Brother?" he mocks with a raised eyebrow. "Have you convinced them I'm the terrible villain yet?"
"They didn't need very much convincing after your actions these last days Loki," Thor replies. "But it is of no concern. You will answer to these people for your actions here, and then you will answer for them on Asgard before our father."
Loki's face darkens. "Your father," he spits. "Not mine. Remember?"
Steve doesn't imagine the look of hurt on Thor's face. It's an expression of old injury and deep hurt, the kind that only family can cause. "Our father," he repeats, doing so as quietly as a person with a voice that deep can. "Always. Even if you have forgotten. Now stand and come with us."
Loki's face isn't any less stormy, but he stands, rolling his eyes at Steve's raised shield and Stark's still glowing repulsers. "Oh put those away," he snaps. "I know when I'm outmatched. I am not the god here who charges ahead despite bad odds."
Neither Stark nor Steve lower their weapons.
They meet up with the jet in a newly emptied field and make the rest of the journey back to the carrier in relative peace. Agent Romanov introduces herself to Thor and makes a face when they go over a spot of turbulence. The face is an exaggerated one of displeasure and Steve wonders at the outward display. In the hours since he's met the woman, she's barely shifted from a poker face once.
Thor notices the expression as well. "My apologies," he says, sounding sincere. "I fear in the struggle I have allowed my emotions to get the better of me. The situation will soon be rectified." He gives one hand a slow wave and a ripple of what seems to be thickened air radiates out from his palm. Steve feels it ruffle through his hair, and then the plane evens out in it's flight.
Natasha thanks him and then glides easily back to her seat with the steps of a dancer. She flits past Steve as she goes and gives him half a wry smile. "Neat trick for a not god," she says, quoting back the comment he'd made upon leaving the plane. "Don't you think?"
"Not sure neat is the word I'd go with Ma'am," Steve replies, feeling unsettled by having watched what can only be described as magic. Twists and expansions of science had been one thing. Whatever Loki and Thor are seems to be something else, and he isn't sure he likes it.
Romanov shrugs. "Better than turbulence," then vanishes.
Steve feels the flush race up the back of his neck as he realized her meaning. The woman had noticed how uncomfortable the shaking and rattling had made him and moved to intervene on his behalf. Since taking the serum, Steve has gotten used to being able to hide his weaknesses. Apparently, he's not as good as he thought.
He doesn't like that either.
Fury locks Loki inside a containment cell when they land and they all retreat to a lab room, taking Loki's scepter with them for Banner to examine. Stark will have his chance too and Steve just hopes that between two geniuses there's enough common sense not to do anything stupid. On later reflection, that might have been asking for a little too much.
Whatever strange magic the scepter and the Tesseract possess steals in to their heads like a cat through a shadowed doorway and they all say all the worst things they've ever thought about each other. Thor calls them all tiny and petty, the way an indulgent but spiteful teacher might mock children. Romanov and Fury throw around words like undisciplined and reckless.
Stark accuses Fury of keeping a stranglehold on vital information and Romanov of helping him. He jabs furiously at Banner, recklessly trying to provoke a reaction. He's a danger because he's smart and clever and has long practice in learning to spite people and rile them on purpose. Steve tries to put him in check and Stark spins on him all too readily. "You're a laboratory experiment Rogers," he bites out scathingly. "Everything special about you came out of a bottle."
Steve calls Anthony Edward Stark selfish, lazy, arrogant, and self-obsessed. A small man pretending to be bigger than he is by hiding inside a suit of armor. He's two steps from spitting out that his father would have been disappointed in him, that he is half the man Howard was, and they'd all be better off if he were here instead. He doesn't know if he really believes that, but the words are dancing on the tip of his tongue and ready to dance off when Banner picks up the scepter and everything grinds to a halt.
He reveals that he's tried to push down his dark side, tried to end the threat he knows he contains as Steve calculates weather it's possible for him to move fast enough to grab the Tesseract before Banner's giant green alter-ego comes out to play. Before they can formulate a reply or a plan, Banner calls them all someone's lab experiment, a combustable mix thats about to blow and annihilate all the bystanders.
It's not necessarily a metaphor that Steve disagrees with. They are five separate substance, acids and accelerants and base elements that can't and won't mix peacefully. They're not remotely a team or anything like it.
At least, they aren't until after the attack on the carrier, after the Battle.
The attack on the carrier is horrible. People die and the carnage is brutal and pointless just as it always is. The death of Agent Coulson hits especially hard. Steve hadn't really known the man, had been aware of his existence for maybe forty-eight hours, but he had seen just so fundamentally good that it had left an impression anyway. The death of any good man, good person, is just as unbearable as it ever has been.
The sense of group mourning twists Steve's stomach. It's both too alike, and too different from how the commandoes had gathered after Bucky had died. That death had been just as pointless and Steve had been just as powerless to stop it. Guilt, anger, shame, and grief fight a familiar battle under his skin and it's so strong Steve nearly can't stand it.
He wants to run, wants to fight, wants to punch something until his knuckles bleed and then keep punching so that the cuts stay open. He wants to bleed this feeling out from his veins until it can't make it to his heart any longer. He thinks he'd welcome feeling numb and frozen for another seventy years if it meant not feeling like this.
Something good does come from it. This is the feeling that gives he and Stark, Thor and Banner and Romanov, Fury and Hill, the common ground they need to finally gel. Anger and a desire for vengeance, purpose, and potency provide the stabilizers to counteract their volatility and produce something useful and worth having.
Barton wakes up, and the man shares the same thoughts. Steve knows how helpful a trained sniper can be, and he's seen the lethality of Barton's particular skills up close. He lets Romanov make the call to bring him along and tells the man to suit up for combat. Somehow, it is his decision to make.
Without meaning too or wanting too, Steve is leading a team again. He's jumped from one war straight in to another and the fact that this, that violence and combat are what makes him feel comfortable in this new century is a lurking punch in the gut. Steve has never wanted to believe that he is a violent man. That seems to be a truth that's getting harder to avoid.
Irksine had told Steve that it was more important to be a good man than it was to be a perfect soldier. The longer Steve had fought, the more he had wondered if the scientist had said it because he had known that it wasn't possible to be both. No one ever talks about what it would take for a good man to be the best at war.
Steve is the best soldier there has ever been.
Still, in Steve's world, everything has been ripped away and changed. Seventy years passed in a day and the ground below his feet blurs and slides like oil pain in turpentine. Everything has changed...
But war is the same.
They land in New York and Steve is imminently grateful for the time he has spent wandering the city streets. It means that he has a functioning tactical map in his mind before the battle ever begins. He deploys the team he has, working with all of their known tactical abilities and handicaps to give them the best advantage and coordinates with the police to cordon off and evacuate as much of the city as possible to try to minimize collateral damages.
He sends Thor to contain the portal in an effort to limit their adversaries to only the ones still on the ground. Stark proves his combat worth quickly by provoking Loki and stealing a new suit. The A.I inside helps mark out patterns in the battle and the suit provides fire power and mobility they desperately need against the bigger monsters. When Banner arrives, Steve keeps his instructions simple and gets out of the way. The Hulk seems to appreciate his strategy. Romanov stays on the ground with Steve in the heart of the battle, keeping the fight contained, and Steve feels his respect for her grow with every passing moment.
The decision to send Barton to higher ground pays off in spades with every enemy alien that drops to the ground with an arrow in their flesh. Steve is so distracted by the carnage and trying to find pattern in the chaos that he doesn't have time to wonder about why some of the arrows are gold instead of black. He sees the bright flashes off sunlight dancing through the violence, figures they're caused by light reflecting off the glass sided buildings of midtown, and doesn't think about it anymore past making sure he doesn't look directly at the panels to preserve his vision.
Stark flies a bomb through a wormhole to end the battle. He almost doesn't fall back out of it again, laws of physics about what goes up regardless. The Hulk catches the falling body and Steve feels a wave of the strongest relief he's ever experienced when Tony jolts back in to consciousness.
"What happened? Please tell me nobody kissed me?"
Steve laughs, and the sound is rusty. That's okay though. It's his first laugh in weeks. It's his first laugh in seventy years.
"We won," he tells the younger- older?- other man.
Stark blinks. "Oh, well okay yay! Good for us. You know what guys? Let's just not come in tomorrow, okay? Let's just, take a day..."
Whether or not they're going to take a day, they do take a coupe of minutes. Thor helps Tony prop himself up against a nearby car and takes a knee beside him, hammer in hand. Hulk huffs and grunts, but shuffles around so that his bulk blocks them from the view of any potential reporters or stragglers in the street. Steve curls his arms around his knees and tries to ignore the biting throb in his right side between the ribs.
When they all feel like they can get up and walk again, they make their way back to Stark Tower. It's slow going given the state of their party and the number of obstacles they have to clamber over, shift, or otherwise get around. Still. they get there faster than they might on an average Tuesday fighting Midtown traffic.
They hand Loki and the Tesseract both over to the SHIELD agents in the lobby of the Tower and go for Shawarma like Tony had wanted. If Barton puts an arrow through his shoulder first thus violation those sections of the Geneva Convention which deal with the fair and ethical treatment of prisoners of war and enemy combatants post surrender then, well, those laws were made for humans weren't they? Besides, none of those laws have anything to do about fair retribution for mind control.
Frankly, Steve is impressed with Barton's self-control. He would have aimed for a head shot. Quick and clean, like Bucky always said.
It's not like the damage is lasting. Loki swears twice in Asgardian and yanks the arrow out by the point through his shoulder. Blue blood wells up around the wound and then seems to freeze over and vanish as the rendered flesh heals. "Feeling better now archer?" he asks Barton with acid in his voice.
Barton simply knocks another arrow. "Hard to tell," he says, his voice full of an impressive level of cold combat calm. "Maybe I should just keep trying until I'm sure."
They're interrupted by SHIELD announcing their arrival and Steve leads the way to the elevators.
They walk eighteen blocks to find the restaurant, and Steve is impressed by the fact that Stark had remembered the exact location from a three second fly-by mid combat engagement. His file had said that he had an eidetic memory. Steve does too, more or less, since the serum, but there are always details that escape him if he doesn't purposefully commit all the minutia to his mind.
It works something roughly like this; the shawarma restaurant is not tactically mission critical at this time. Details of the location of the shawarma restaurant will, therefore, be unavailable until such a time as they are useful.
The place seems to have escaped the worst of the carnage. Rubble consisting mainly of broken glass and pulverized drywall scatters the floor and one of the windows is blown out. Only half the lights are on and those flicker feebly like staying on is taking all the effort stored in their fragile filaments. A pipe leaks lazily fro the ceiling and Steve gives it a cursory look to make sure that the structural integrity isn't so compromised that the second-hand book store upstairs isn't about to crash in to their dinner.
Romanov helps Barton over to a table and Thor pulls out a chair for the archer before clapping him on the shoulder and taking a seat himself. Out of all of them Thor, and Banner who had lost the Hulk sometime on their walk over here, are the two who are the least beat up. Thor is vocally hungry, but is looking around the facilities with evident curiosity and enjoyment now that the combat is over. Banner looks exhausted and somewhat diminished, but he's not bloody or bruised which puts him ahead of the rest of them.
"I've got this one Rogers," Stark tells him when he notices that Steve hasn't followed the others. "Go park it while I get us our food."
Steve could protest at this point by mentioning the fact that the man may have technically died for a minute or two about half an hour ago. He could also point out that it doesn't actually look like there's anyone behind the counter prepared to serve them food of any description whatsoever. Instead, he turns and just about falls in to the chair on Romanov's left. His side feels like someone has lit a fire under it and the adrenaline crash means he wants to just curl up and sleep for a week. He might do that anyway, but he knows from experience that food needs to come first.
Tony takes the jarringly expedient step of ringing the bell on the counter for attention. "Hello," he calls. "People of Shawarma Land Restaurant. I would like to give you large amounts of money in exchange for goods and services."
The speed with which those words summon someone wiling to cook for them should be nothing short of a minor miracle given the disaster zone this city is. Hell, it should be a minor miracle for an average evening in Manhattan, but the day has been so full of miracles and shit that Steve doesn't want to call magic that it barely warrants a mental note. The man behind the counter has rubble in his hair, but he's still holding a notebook with which to take their order and gives Stark a dubious look.
"Yes Sir?" he says, voice questioning in fluent though accented English. "The kitchen is still working, but not very much is ready."
"Right, so, question for you. How long would it take to make everything on the menu."
The man behind the counter looks first at the table they're all occupying, eyes taking in their strange collection of uniforms, Thor's hammer and Steve's shield. "The whole menu Sir?"
Stark nods. "Everything. Starters to Baklava."
He blinks. "We have many of the cold offerings in the refrigerator. Everything else will need to be cooked. The ovens will have to warm. It will take two hours to cook everything, but we can serve dishes as they are prepared."
"Excellent," Tony declares with a decisive nod. Then he extracts a wad of cash so big that Steve could have used it to buy a house in 1945 and lays it on the counter. "We need at least three of everything and a whole lot of water. This runs out just holler."
The man takes the cash and starts to count it, eyes going wider and wider as he goes. Then he coughs twice and punches the totals in on a somehow still functioning register. "Amir," he says, turning to call through the swinging doors in to what must be the kitchen.
A boy who must be Amir and can't be any older than fifteen slips out of the kitchen and over to stand across from the man. "Yes Abba?"
"Tell your mother we have customers. Tell her to have the kitchen cook six full dinners. Two chicken, two lamb, two vegetarian. Starters through desserts. Then come back here and start sweeping this mess up. We con't want our guests breathing in all this dust."
The boy nods and moves to do what he's told. "Seems like a good kid," Stark comments. He pulls out another handful of cash. "Tip him well."
Tony pulls up a chiar at the opposite side of the table from Steve just as the first of their cold appetizers arrive. He scoops up a large dollop of hummus with a piece of flatbread, chews, and swallows. "Gotta love this city," he comments around a mostly full mouth. "Directly post apocalypse and the corner Shawarma place is ready to get six assholes in body armor an eight course meal."
"How much money did you pay him for that meal?" Romanov asks, popping a stuffed grape leaf in to her mouth before handing a container of dip to Barton.
Stark just shrugs. "Probably a couple hundred bucks. That's what I normally keep with me. Pepper is the one who normally knows these things." Steve is suddenly and painfully reminded of a time during the war when a French hotel hadn't wanted to let in Jones and Morita. Howard had solved the problem by buying the building with cash he'd had on hand in his jacket pocket.
Romanov waves a hand at him. "You should call her. Pepper is great. She'd want to know you're alive."
"I called," Tony protests. She levels a stare at him and the man visibly quails. Steve isn't surprised. He's spent most of the day getting an up close and personal perspective on Agent Romanov's combat abilities. A glare from her seems like exactly the kind that might be considered a threat in and of itself. "When I was going through a wormhole. Okay I'll call."
"Ought I to call Lady Jane?" Thor wonders aloud. "Would she be concerned? Perhaps I should wait until more is known of the fate of Dr. Selvig."
"Dr. Selvig is currently sedated and recovering at a SHIELD facility," Barton informs the (okay Steve will say it) demigod. "And Dr. Foster is in transit back from an observatory in Oslo. Her phone probably isn't working."
Thor frowns. "This Midgardian method of cellular communication is most strange," he comments. "My Lady and Lady Darcy of the Hand-held Lightning explained it to me last time I visited this realm. The method seems rather perilous and unreliable."
"I am working on fixing that," Stark chips in. "But getting around the legal regulations to make the replacement technology commercially viable is a nightmare."
"You have my sympathy Metal Man."
The conversation reduces to a low buzz in Steve's ears and eventually peters out all together as the main courses arrive. Steve chews his way through a large platter of delicious tasting chicken and wonders when exactly he might be able to just pass out. The pain in his side is positively radiant by now and it's leaving it's power as a pattern of dazzling white and red spots in a field of vision which is intermittently flickering black, rather like the lights in the ceiling.
He's jarred out of his stupor when a bell rings above the door of the restaurant. Barton has a weapon pointed at the girl walking through it before Steve can even tell that the figure entering is a girl. The fact that the rest of them don't move just as quickly says a lot about their conditions and Steve dutifully makes the needed tactical notes. There's nothing wrong with a new person entering their vicinity so long as that person isn't hostile. That said, had this girl been a threat, they could have been in serious trouble.
Luckily for them, the girl- no woman- now standing ankle deep in window glass looks about as non-threatening as a human being possibly can. The blonde braid falling down her back is falling apart and there are streaks of grime across her face. The hands that she raises to show she's unarmed are spotted with dried blood and there's more of the substance smearing her clothes. Her eyes have the exhausted look of a person running on duty and nothing more. Between that and the open medical bag hanging by her side, her purpose in this city, and more specifically in this restaurant, becomes clear.
"Can we help you with something?" Stark asks. Under other circumstances, Steve would chastise him for rudeness. At this moment, he's just happy that someone else is dealing with the hard questions. He can barely get his eyes to focus, he doesn't have the energy to dig in to the finer points of what he's seeing.
"If I move is someone going to blast me or something?" she asks. It might not be the most sensitive thing to say but it gets her message across. She seems to deicde that she can move without provoking violence because she drops her hands and gestures to her bag "I'm a medic. Is anyone here injured?"
Stark glances around at the assembled group. "Uh… yeah. Try pretty much all of us."
The girl takes the words in stride nods, kneels down, and starts unloading the contents of her bag. The motions are clearly well-practiced in their efficiency and Steve spares a thought to wonder how and when she learned them, what sort fo life she's led to make her so very comfortable with violence. She looks up and looks them all over with a practiced eye. "Who's first?"
Stark's cuts are pretty easy to treat. Most head wounds look worse than they actually are and once the blood is off there's a nasty bruise and a decent cut but nothing too critical. She shines a light in his eyes and diagnoses a concussion based on pupillary response. "Don't sleep for more than three hours at a time for a little while," the girl warns. It's basic protocol for a head injury and Banner intervenes when Stark tries to argue about it. Steve wonders how much of Stark's argument is genuine protests and how much is just to fill silences he doesn't like at any given time.
The girl wraps Barton's ankle next and removes a disturbingly large pile of bloody glass slivers from his back without comment apart from a stricture not to casually leap through windows. She pulls out a half empty bottle of rubbing alcohol and empties it unceremoniously splashes it over his skin, callously and professionally ignoring the one wince Barton lets show before moving on to Natasha and the stitches she needs for her face. Steve thinks she might leave her with care instructions, but he's slipping in and out of consciousness so badly he can't be sure.
He knows that now is when he should say something, mention the sticky and sickly feeling leeching over his skin from his side, but his tongue feels thick and fuzzy and his eyelids feel like they have anvils attached. Somehow, the girl (Steve's brain keeps marking her that way and he can't seem to make it stop) who is playing the part of their ministering angel for tonight's events seems to realize it anyway. Her touch is a phantom sensation dancing along a rent in his body armor and the torn flesh below.
Her fingers are warm. The touch is precise, clever, and agile.
Steve feels the moment that they encounter the projectile lodged in his body. He hasn't felt the actually nature of the metal embedded there around the pain, but he knows now that something must be there. The girl glances up at him and Steve feels her fingers tap lightly, big blue eyes gaging his expression for a reaction. "Can you feel that?" she asks. "The pain, pressure, anything?"
Steve shrugs. Her voice is a clear and musical kind of thing. Ringing and resonating like a bell. The girl taps a few more times, positioning a pair of tweezers to get around the foreign object in his skin. The she shrugs right back at him. "Well if you didn't before, you're about to."
The warning Steve appreciates. Less so the sickening plunger suck and scarlet agony of the shrapnel pulling free. All credit to the medic, she does the thing quickly. Her hand doesn't tremble and she yanks the thing out level. She packs the wound with the last of her medical gauze and Steve feels the stickiness fo the tape she presses along it to hold the material in place. A small, sharp, jolt sinks in to his skin and Steve twitches for the first time since her exam had started.
"Sorry," she apologizes. "That happens sometimes. Electrostatic shock." Steve feels the air shift as she rocks backwards to stand up, and by the time she'd dumped alcohol on to the cut the pain has receded enough for him to feel it.
She makes to leave and a thought slams through Steve's mind that this isn't right. This girl should stay. She might get hurt if she leaves. She helped them so she shouldn't be hurt. Someone should make her stay.
Romanov beats him to the punch and pulls the girl in to a seat beside Steve instead. The girl takes the seat and the food with a word of fervent thanks and digs in. Steve notices that the knees of her pants are seeping blood through the material. He hopes that there will be someone (a parent, a sibling, friend, roommate, boyfriend, someone) at her home, wherever that is, to patch her up the way she has for them.
The thought that he might not is what prompts Steve to slide his plate of chicken over to her before propping his head up on his hand to take a nap. She's gone when Steve wakes up and Stark tells him he ordered a car for her as he's ordering a second to take them all to a hotel he knows in Jersey that will have rooms for them. That the girl will get home safe is good, the Manhattan kid in him thinks Jersey is not so much.
He's stopped caring about that by the time they get to the hotel and he passes out for a solid six hours before they make their way back in to the city as a team to help with the ongoing recovery efforts. Loki and Thor leave the planet later that day and nice as Thor has turned out to be Steve is not sorry to see them go. HIs worldview isn't ready for god's just yet.
Unknown to Captain Steven Grant Rogers U.S Army, the world of gods doesn't particularly care what he is and isn't ready for.
A/N: *Pokes head out from behind the couch*. So? What did you guys think? Is this something I should keep going with when I have the spare time. I've never really attempted anything like this before so I need all the feedback you can give me. I've been chewing it over in my head for a while and finally got something in writing over the last week or so. I thought it would be appropriate to get it out on the 4th of July. No matter what you thought, review for me! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxox