Such as battles are—that is to say, adrenaline-warped, fear-filled, noisy, and chaotic—Stevie hardly remembered the majority of it not even five minutes afterward. When asked, she replied, "Ma'am, I'd love to give you a blow-by-blow as mighty as it is humorous—" (as Thor was doing several yards away to a half-manic reporter) "—but once you've punched one Chitauri, you've punched them all."
(Edited out was, "…punched them all, like aluminum armor over half-dried cockroach guts.")
"Stevie, stop terrorizing the reporters," Natasha (her real name, go figure) said, a slight smile tugging on one side of her lips.
"If they want the blow-by-blow, they should go to Thor. He's got eyes in the sky," Stevie said in response.
"I think what you really want is FOX News blowing a gasket when they realize that Thor's an actual alien prince formerly worshipped as a god, and could arguably still be classified as one," Natasha countered.
"Oh no," Stevie deadpanned. "You caught me and foiled my dastardly plans."
Natasha's not-smile got bigger, and the reporter flat-out laughed.
On a completely unrelated note, shawarma is absolutely disgusting. Stevie ate it anyway; she was starving.
For lack of anything better to do with him, Loki was slapped with magic-inhibiting cuffs that Thor had apparently had on him since he touched down on the Quinjet two days before. The dark-haired god was then tied—enthusiastically, thanks to Clint—to one of the oddest-looking chairs Steve had ever seen.
"It's ergonomic," Banner said, when he saw here eyeing it skeptically. She then gave him an equally skeptical look. "It means that it's good for your spine. It's also reinforced with some of the strongest metals on the planet. Tony had JARVIS cook it up in his fabricator."
Since Stevie's knowledge of metals was limited to tin, rust, and vibranium, she decided to take his word for it.
"I don't trust SHIELD," Tony said at one point, when they were discussing where to keep chair-bound Loki.
In accordance to the rules, when someone says something that you emphatically agree with, you fist-bump them. Tony and Stevie fist-bumped enthusiastically.
"Just how long have you been here, Rogers?" Tony asked curiously.
"What, SHIELD didn't tell you about the shoddy '40s-era hospital that convinced me with a single breath that I'd been captured by the enemy?" Stevie asked innocently.
Tony stared at the woman who was a solid six-to-eight inches taller than him blankly. After a moment, he said: "JARVIS, when you have a moment and SHIELD isn't in a state of emergency for longer than twelve hours, do something truly horrible to them."
"That will be quite a while, then, Sir."
"Spend that time plotting."
"I shall plot most evilly, Sir."
"JARVIS, you are the greatest," Stevie said through her giggles. Honestly, even Loki looked mildly impressed.
(In the end, it wouldn't matter. SHIELD would be torn to the ground by vengeful supersoldiers and resentful assassins within a matter of months.)
Natasha said, "Stevie's led SHIELD on a wild goose chase for the past five and a half months. She broke out of the facility in a matter of minutes, and in a matter of hours, she disappeared completely."
Tony, Banner, and Clint looked suitably impressed. Thor looked like he knew he should be impressed, but was not entirely certain of why.
"I am curious, how did you manage to disappear so thoroughly?" Clint asked.
Stevie arched an eyebrow. "There's going to the ground, and then there's going to the underground."
"You didn't," Clint said disbelievingly.
"I missed something important, I hate doing that," Tony said. "What did I miss?"
"Captain America became a mercenary as bribery, threat, or payment for something," Clint said incredulously.
Stevie looked unimpressed. "Please don't get hypocritical."
"Stevie, stop teasing him," Natasha said.
"Okay, fine," she agreed. "I didn't become a mercenary. I just trained them."
Tony coughed. "What exactly did you train them in exchange for?"
"Two months' apartment rent without cameras on the immediate street, papers to stand up to an international spy agency's nosiness, and a historian and therapist who kept no computer records and could have their silence on my identity bought for as long as necessary," Stevie said easily.
"I forgot how well being a mercenary paid," Clint said.
"You don't know the greatest part, either," Stevie laughed.
"Do I want to know?" Banner muttered.
"You do, actually," Stevie said.
Banner paused. "Okay, now I'm curious."
Stevie leaned forward. "I'm not a mercenary. There's only one thing that I can do that I can teach someone that can't be taught in basic training in the U.S. Army, and that's eyeballing the crap out of ricocheting objects."
There was a stunned pause, and then Natasha surprised them all by laughing loud and hard.
"You're a piece of work," Tony said admiringly. "How mad were your employers?"
"Livid, until they brought in an actual mercenary for me to fight and the mercenary stepped back within thirty seconds and said, 'Precision and basic Army training, just faster than most can keep up with. Why?'"
Clint joined Natasha and cackled.
Stevie simply smiled.
She spent a week doing nothing but eating (mostly pancakes, as most of the other foods she didn't even know what they could possibly be used for), sleeping (in a cot in one of the conference rooms in Stark Tower), and drawing. Then she contacted a t-shirt company and told them who she was, and offered to pay for several hundred thousand of six stylized shirts: one light blue with the helmet of Iron Man, one light green with a cartoonish and darker green fist, one dark blue with her shield, one red with Thor's hammer, one purple with a nocked and drawn bow, and one black with a simple red hourglass. On the back of each shirt was the white stylized A that had come to symbolize the Avengers as a whole.
The t-shirt company made them for free, and Stevie said thank-you in the form of good advertisement: lettering at the bottom of each shirt telling the world that the company made them for free to help raise funds for rebuilding New York City.
Stevie got in contact with Pepper, who promptly gave her the addresses of all of the Stark Industries sites, big or small, and told her to divvy up the shirts as she saw fit.
Turns out, four hundred thousand shirts lasted all of half a day before they were gone, at twelve dollars apiece. Stevie donated every last bit of the 4.8 million dollars that she'd raised to the state with the stipulation of it being used for recovery from major disasters.
When she visited the website again to order more shirts, there was a banner on the page:
Individual t-shirts will temporarily be more expensive. Avengers t-shirts are regularly priced, with all proceeds being donated to the State of New York to help with the rebuilding. We have currently raised $1,217,076 for the State of New York.
Stevie gleefully ordered another five hundred thousand shirts, and had them shipped to all the Stark Industries sites.
We have currently raised $7,218,612 for the State of New York.
Not half an hour later, Pepper poked her head into the conference room that was serving as her sleeping room. "Stevie?"
"Hiya, Pepper."
"I need your bank account. As we make back the money, we'll give it back to you so you can order more. Sound fair?"
Stevie nodded. "Extremely," she said, and rattled off the account.
"Great. Here's your phone. It has my number and Tony's number already in it, so if you need anything, call. Also, I'll probably end up calling you, so don't freak out when it makes a loud racket."
Stevie nodded, and caught the older woman before she dashed away once more. "Pepper? Tony did some of the heavy lifting for the Tower with the Iron Man suit on, right?"
Pepper arched an eyebrow. "Just how did you hear about this?"
JARVIS was a horrible gossip with those he deemed trustworthy, and "shipped" Pepper and Tony so much it was ridiculous, but Stevie wasn't about to rat him out.
"Tony gets on tangents, occasionally."
Pepper snorted. "Just occasionally? Yes, he did some of the heavy lifting. Why?"
"I was going to go out and help move rubble. I bet Iron Man and I can lift the larger items with a lot of precision to avoid damaging anything underneath."
"In case there are people underneath," she said, her smile compassionate. "Of course, I'll make sure that JARVIS lets Tony know now and then remind him at…say, two o'clock tomorrow? For an hour and a half?"
Stevie privately thought that she could go longer, but Tony was a busy man with a company to help run and physically rebuild, as well as dealing with politicians left, right, and center. She nodded.
"I'll call the teams," Pepper said briskly. "Then I'll let you know where they want you two."
"Yes, ma'am," Stevie said, smiling a bit.
Pepper hesitated, her small smile falling off her face. "Stevie…if you find someone…you weren't here for 9/11, you didn't look out your boss's window to suddenly see the first World Trade Center tower go down in a heap of steel, glass, and dust. It's going to be…terrifying and heartwrenching."
Stevie's lips thinned. "So was liberating a few concentration camps between HYDRA facilities."
Stevie and Tony met with a SWAT team member with a German Shepard at his side in Lower East Central. One of the behemoth alien carriers clipped the upper south end of one of the old-style towers, the ones where they looked like children's bricks rather than coming to points—and ended up knocking the entire upper half into the street, where it collapsed into large chunks of concrete.
There were survivors, the SWAT member said. They knew that for a fact, he said, because one woman had a Starkphone and called her father, who was in the National Guard, who alerted the rescue teams, who sent SWAT, who have been excavating the area since the battle against the aliens ended.
Tony preened. His phone survived an alien invasion and a building collapse, and was still good enough to get signal through several feet of concrete, steel, and glass.
Stevie knew that she was impressed.
"You make awesome phones," she said.
"Of course I do, you just missed it, being a Capsicle."
"I'm probably never going to buy one, but I can definitely see the usefulness in emergency situations like this," Stevie continued.
The voice modulator made a half-static noise that was probably Tony huffing. Stevie bit back a grin.
"We want you to start with this slab—"
"Cap, why don't we work on the pocket of air that we're standing on?"
Stevie pulled out the phone that Pepper had given her. JARVIS sent her a picture of a three-dimensional model of the rubble, complete with slabs, pockets of air, and thermal imaging of the people underneath. She showed it to the SWAT member. "Iron Man, that sounds like a great idea."
Stevie grabbed a flat shovel and proceeded to use it like a broom.
After fifteen minutes of digging and vaporizing the rubble, Tony took over, carefully lasering a very small hole through some rocks.
"Hello?" Stevie called.
"Be careful!" a man cried. "The part that you're standing on is about to go!"
"How big is the space?" Stevie asked.
"About ten feet wide, maybe five feet tall."
Stevie looked considering at the rubble behind her, then at the rubble below her. Then she looked at Iron Man, and held up her arm. "Sir, I would get to the opposite side of the space. I'm going to trigger the slide, and you'll have a sturdy slab of concrete over you that won't budge an inch."
She waited. "Are you on the opposite side?"
"Yes."
Stevie jumped, Iron Man took to the air. Stevie came down, Iron Man kept her from falling into the space by wrapping a dead gauntlet around her outstretched arm and keeping her in the air. When the rubble stopped moving, Stevie was set down and helped the man and his son squirm through the foot-and-a-half wide crack between the rubble and the slab of concrete.
The man's eyebrows suddenly became one with his hair when he caught sight of Steve's luridly colored outfit. "Captain America?"
"Iron Man!" the kid squealed, hugging the titanium-gold armor like it's as cuddly as a stuffed bunny. For all Stevie knew, it might as well be, in comparison to cold concrete. Clean tracks on the boy's otherwise dusty and dirty face told her that he'd been crying.
"Cute kid," Tony said, flipping the faceplate up. He shot a glance at Stevie, a vaguely HELP look, but Stevie wasn't any better with small children.
She was just glad that the kid hadn't chosen her to latch onto.
They moved heavy slabs of concrete. They freed a few more people. Stevie got a lift on Air Stark to the other place that the rescue teams really wanted heavy lifting and precision and thought that they could do within Pepper Potts's timeline of an hour and a half.
Stevie ended up holding up a very heavy slab of concrete on her shoulders a lá Atlas while more than twenty people fled the imminently-collapsing pocket and Tony was inside, melting rock and flash-freezing it to keep it from altogether collapsing while people limped or were dragged/carried/helped out.
(Tony later informed her that if she practiced, she could blast straight past human limits with no speed limit posted. The several-tonned slab of concrete definitely confirmed that.)
Pepper Potts was right, per usual. By the time the hour and a half was up, Stevie was exhausted, and dragged Tony to a pizza place that had been there since before Stevie had been born.
#HeavyLifting trended in the top ten for the next three months.
#NewYorkStyle trended off and on in the top twenty-five for the next decade, though, and it wasn't just referring to their cheesecake or pizza.
The next day, Stevie set up another hour and a half appointment with the rescue teams, and this time, she brought Natasha with her.
Natasha is incredibly bendy.
Natasha very much enjoyed the #BlackContortionist that trended for a while.
However, Natasha cackled at the uproar when Stevie took Thor out with her the next day, and the two of them powered through rubble like it was no heavier than a regular Jenga game. #NewYorkJenga and #SuperheroJenga kept her entertained for months, long after it stopped trending.
When the city was in not-immediately-going-to-self-destruct mode, they eagerly sent Thor and his mad little brother off-world. Central Park was a great place for a teleportation site, apparently.
Who knew?
Steve Rogers certainly didn't.