Thanks to everyone who read and Qweb, Anastasia Jamieson, Harm Marie, ArtemisGrim, Preferably, not paranoid enough, and AlienTourist for reviewing.
Tony darted in, tagging his ribs, but Steve had figured out his twisting escape now, and he made it around fast enough to clip Tony in return.
"Damn," Tony muttered, darting back out of reach. "I thought that would work for a while longer."
The fact that Tony was beyond Steve's reach meant that Steve was safe for the time being as well, and his eyes narrowed as he evaluated his opponent. Tony was quick, and he had more muscle than Steve had expected, but he didn't have the serum-enhanced reflexes that Steve did. Or the same endurance, because while Steve had just barely broken a sweat, Tony's breathing was becoming ragged. Still, Steve was feeling a lot better than he had been when he'd decided to come down to the gym. "Next point wins and—and we get some supper?" he suggested.
Tony tilted his head, obviously catching the mid-sentence correction.
Steve waved it off. What he'd almost said was 'and loser buys supper' which would have been an appropriate joke among his army buddies—it never mattered that he almost always won since there was nowhere to eat but the chow tent anyway—but this wasn't the army and he was already taking advantage of Tony's hospitality by staying at the tower in the first place.
"Have I won any points?" Tony asked.
Steve grinned. Tony had tagged him a few times, but that was about it.
"JARVIS, figure out what Spangles doesn't like and order it for dinner."
"Steve," Steve said with a roll of his eyes. "And I grew up during the depression, remember?" Not liking food was a luxury he'd never had. Frankly he'd been lucky that there hadn't been any food sensitivities among his myriad of other pre-serum health issues.
"I would also like to point out that after the incident with the strawberries, you requested that I ensure that all food intending to be given to or shared with others didn't violate any of their dietary requirements and/or preferences," JARVIS added.
"Right. Damn. Fine, then, order whatever." He looked back at Steve. "What do you want? Mexican? Thai? More pizza?"
"You don't have to," Steve began, but Tony shook his head, cutting him off.
"I'm getting hungry. This way we have food waiting for us when we're done instead of having to do that pesky cooking thing that Pepper has informed me that I should avoid anyway. Besides, I needed to borrow a piece from my oven a few weeks ago and I haven't gotten around to fixing it yet."
"I…why did you need to borrow a piece from your oven?" Somehow he knew that he shouldn't ask—all he'd intended to do when he'd opened his mouth was offer the use of the oven in his kitchen or at the very least point out that there was another in the communal kitchen area on his floor—but the question had just slipped out.
"I had an idea and needed a heating coil and it was convenient. And then You broke the rack getting it for me so I have to fix that too."
"I didn't break anything," Steve objected. He hadn't even been around a few weeks ago.
"What? No, not you, You. My robot. One of my robots. I didn't introduce you?" He shook his head, not waiting for Steve's answer. "Right, I banished them to my workshop after Dummy tried to put out Rhodey's insignia again and they haven't come back down. I'll introduce you later."
"I...right," Steve said after a moment, mostly for lack of anything else to say.
"So, food?"
"Whatever you'd like would be fine. Really."
"JARVIS, order Chinese," Tony ordered, apparently taking him at his word. "The good kind. And make sure they don't forget the fortune cookies this time."
"Of course, sir."
Tony grinned and brought up his hands, beginning to circle again. "All right, old man, last point."
Steve shook his head and then dropped a shoulder as Tony feinted, moving in for his own attack. Tony wasn't going to score a point this time either if he had any say in it, but he wasn't ruling out Tony pulling some sneaky stunt, especially since they weren't staying entirely to the formal rules of boxing. Mixed martial arts, Tony had called it when Steve had objected to his first trick, although Steve had noticed that wrestling didn't seem to be one of the arts mixed in. Or maybe it was and Tony just had better sense than to try it since as soon as Steve got a hand on him the weight difference alone meant that he'd be pretty solidly doomed.
Tony came at him twice more with feints before attacking, but Steve was ready for him and lashed out with an attack of his own that sent Tony backpedaling quickly. Tony managed to avoid the—carefully pulled—uppercut, but it set him off balance, and as he scrambled to the side Steve grinned and pressed his advantage. There were no ropes, but they'd been treating the edge of the mat as bounds, and another step or two and he'd have Tony over it.
Tony tumbled past him suddenly in one of the definitely-not-boxing moves that even Steve's reflexes couldn't compensate for, and it was Steve's turn to stagger as a foot caught him behind the knee. He shifted his weight to his other leg quickly to compensate, twisting hard, and—
There was a grunt and Tony hit the ground even as Steve's hand went to his elbow to rub out the sudden sting. That had been metal he'd connected with, and although it wasn't visible under the shirt Tony was wearing, he realized that it must have been the device in Tony's chest that powered his suit.
"Okay, I officially cut that too close," Tony said, rolling to lie flat on his back, one hand going to rub his chest. "Ow."
"Sorry," Steve said. He hadn't meant to connect that hard, and it was probably a good thing he'd caught Tony in the chest and not the face or Tony would have a bloodied nose at the very least. "Are you okay?"
"I'll live."
Tony stuck his other hand up, waving it around, and after a minute Steve caught it and pulled him back to his feet. He looked steady enough….
"Suppose that means you win," Tony said with a shake of his head, dropping his hand from his chest. "JARVIS, is dinner on the way?"
"The order has been placed and will arrive in approximately twenty minutes."
"Meet you upstairs?" Tony asked.
"Wait, are you sure you're all right? Why do you wear that when you're not in your suit?" Steve could understand him having kept it on on the helicarrier, but surely he wasn't expecting to be attacked here. And he'd been wearing it the other night too, now that Steve thought about it. At the time he hadn't given it a second thought, but he'd been able to see the light through Tony's shirt.
Tony gave him an odd look. "Because if I don't, a bunch of little bits of shrapnel will crawl into my heard and tear it apart."
"What?"
"You're joking, right? That wasn't in the information that Fury gave you?"
Steve opened his mouth and then shut it again. He'd been given an entire folder on Tony—and entire folder on each of them—and when he thought about it there had been something about terrorists in Afghanistan and an explosion that had led to the creation of the first Iron Man suit. That part had only been only a few lines long, though, and Steve had gotten the distinct impression that whoever had written it hadn't had a lot of actual details about how everything fit together either. And the rest of that section had been a bunch of gobbledygook about electric magnets or electronic magnets or something like that, and he'd given up pretty quickly and skipped ahead to Tony's personality profile and then the section on Iron Man's tactical capabilities. "It might have been," he admitted. "I sort of…skimmed…the technical stuff. You have shrapnel—?"
"Did Captain America just admit to cheating on his homework?" Tony interrupted in mock astonishment. "I'm telling Mom."
"If you're referring to Fury, I did not need that image."
Tony grimaced. "I see your point and suddenly need a drink. Or several." He shook his head. "Never mind, it doesn't matter since half of what SHIELD has is wrong anyway. I don't exactly give out specs on this baby." He rapped his knuckles against his chest. "The short version is that I got hurt, I built this—or an earlier version of this, anyway—to keep the shrapnel away from my heart, and in its spare time I use it to power my suit. Simple enough."
Too simple, Steve thought, especially since he hadn't missed the fact that Tony had cut off his half-voiced question, about shrapnel but Tony had already turned on his heel and headed for the elevator.
Steve stared at the cartons on the table in front of him and then leaned back into the cushions of the chair, holding back a groan mostly by force of will. Workouts always built up his appetite, but he had still eaten way too much. Somehow it just hadn't looked like that much food when he'd started opening them.
"JARVIS, that was officially too much Chinese," Tony said, echoing his thoughts even if there were barely half the number of wrappers in front of him that there were in front of Steve. "This was your idea of a subtle response to my comment about your sarcasm routines getting bloated, wasn't it?"
"I am not programmed for subtlety."
Steve snickered despite himself.
"Nobody asked you, Spangles."
"My name is Steve."
Tony slumped back further into the couch, his eyes closing. "Right, I did hear that somewhere before."
For a moment Steve considered throwing the remains of the last carton of orange chicken at him, but that was just a waste of perfectly good food. Not to mention that it would make a mess. "Can I ask you a question?" he asked instead, his eyes focusing on the blue glow that was visible through the thin t-shirt Tony had changed into after their sparring session. "I mean, a serious one."
"Depends." Tony opened one eye to look at him. "Do I have to give a serious answer?"
"Tony."
His eye closed again. "Sorry, but I only give serious answers between four and six on…." He paused for a moment. "Tuesdays."
"You just checked to make sure that it wasn't Tuesday, didn't you?"
"No."
"Yes, you did."
"Nope."
"I—"
"Nuh-uh."
"But—"
"Did not."
Steve reminded himself that he was not six and this was not a playground and forged ahead with his question, ignoring yet another attempt by Tony to interrupt. "How did you end up with shrapnel in your heart? Or your chest or wherever it is."
There was silence for a minute and Steve wasn't sure that Tony was going to respond, but then he opened his eyes and focused on Steve and his expression was serious. "What do you know?"
"From what I read, you were in Afghanistan a few years ago," Steve began cautiously, "and there was some kind of incident involving a group of terrorists. You built the first Iron Man and over there and then came back and built another one, and then you announced you were him at some kind of press conference. And then there was the whole thing about electric magnets that I didn't understand." He wasn't going to bring up the personality profile part unless Tony asked; he already knew that it wasn't the whole truth about Tony anyway.
Tony snorted. "Electromagnets, and if it's the part of the report I'm thinking of, neither did the guy who wrote it. SHIELD scientists tend to be tolerable enough in their individual specialties, but they get out of their depth fast when they start branching out."
Steve suspected that most people got out of their depth fast where Tony's science was concerned, but he knew perfectly well when he was being sidetracked. "What happened to you?" he pressed.
"The 'incident,' as you so eloquently put it, was an attack. The convoy I was traveling with was attacked, and my Humvee was separated from the others. The airmen I was with were killed, and I was kidnapped by the terrorists under the theory that I'd be willing to build weapons for them."
Steve tensed—he might not have understood too much about that section of the report, but he did know that Stark Industries had stopped producing weapons after Tony's return, not before—but Tony kept going before he could ask.
"It was a dumb theory, but, hey, terrorists. The thing is, I'd taken some shrapnel—a lot of shrapnel—to the chest in the attack, not all of which could be surgically removed. Without some way to stop it, it would have gotten to my heart and ripped it apart inside of a week. So Yinsen installed an electromagnet."
"Yinsen?"
"Another prisoner." He shook his head and waved a hand in dismissal. "Anyway, as for electromagnets…." He tilted his head back, staring up at the ceiling for a minute before returning his gaze to Steve. "Have you ever taken any physics classes? Or did they even have magnets back in the Dark Ages?"
"I was in high school in the thirties, Tony; yes, we had magnets. And I took a physics class, too, but it wasn't really my thing." Mr. Taylor had taught it between math classes, and he hadn't been a bad teacher, but Steve had spent more time drawing detailed pictures of the pianos being pushed up inclined planes than actually doing any calculations. It was a little strange, now that he thought about—half of being effective with his shield was knowing how to throw it and where it would ricochet and all of that—but apparently it was all in the application because he still wouldn't know how much force he'd have to use if he had to load a piano onto a truck.
"Well, the important thing to know is that a magnetic field can either attract or repel," Tony continued, drawing him back to the present. "You've seen that, right?"
"Sure, hold two magnets one way and they stick, but if you flip them around they just slide apart when you try to press them together."
Tony nodded. "An electromagnet behaves basically like a normal magnet except that it has its magnetic field generated and controlled by electricity. In my case, the electromagnet that's being used to keep the shrapnel out of my heart is powered by my arc reactor so it stays in even when I'm not in the suit."
"But I thought you built the arc reactor later. You had one with you in Afghanistan?" That didn't even seem to fit with Tony's short version.
Something dark crossed Tony's face. "Yinsen used an alternative energy source to power the first electromagnet, and then I took it from there with some pieces from the weapons our captors had."
"What's alternative?" he asked before he thought better of it.
"A car battery."
"Someone hooked a car battery to your chest?!" It came out louder than Steve had intended and he was glad that no one else had heard, but while he didn't claim to understand the whole reactor thing beyond that it was a power source, he damn well knew what a car battery was and where it should and shouldn't be hooked up.
"Easy, tiger, I plan on using these ears again. Besides, a pair of double-As wasn't to cut it. So I used the car battery for long enough to build the reactor, and then I built the suit instead of the weapons they wanted, busted out, and…Iron Man." Another shrug. "Well, technically that first one fell apart in the desert since it was never intended for continued operation, but like you said, I built another one after I got back. That was the real Mark I."
As far as details went there were obviously plenty still missing, but if Tony's tone was anything to go by—if the fact that he could read Tony's tone was anything to go by—Steve had done about as much prying as he was going to get away with for one night. That meant finding a change of subject, though, and the image of Tony with a car battery wired to his chest wasn't making that easy. "Does War Machine have something like that in him?" he finally asked as silence drew out. "I mean, Colonel Rhodes?" It seemed like a heck of a price to pay to be able to use a suit.
Tony visibly relaxed at the question. "War Machine runs on a reactor, sure, but it's part of the suit, not Rhodey. Mark II never got beyond the testing phase before I switched over to III to deal with a few internals that I wanted altered, and since it's easier to do some of the power-up tests from the outside it still had an independent reactor when Rhodey took it."
"No offense, but that seems like a much better way to go about things."
"You're not going to get any argument from me."
The room went silent again, but somehow it was much more comfortable than it had been a few moments ago, and after a minute Steve looked back over. "Can I ask you something else?" He wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to, but he had to ask somebody, and Tony was here. And he'd know, there was no question about that.
"Is it Tuesday yet?"
"It's Tuesday on Asgard." Or it wasn't—heck, they probably didn't even have a day of the week called Tuesday—but it wasn't like Tony could prove him wrong without Thor here. "Who's Word?"