Title: Resurrection, Reconstruction, and Redemption, 8/13
Authors: seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony. Various canon ships. Sharon/Winter Soldier, for your daily dosage of spy/assassin hotness.
Warnings: Denial fic. Blatant shipper fic. Captain America and Iron Man in a romantic relationship. One non-canonical het pairing. A dire lack of sex. Terrifying amounts of snuggling and angst.

Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. Also, some of the dialogue in chapter five was taken from Brian Michael Bendis's Civil War: The Confession. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.

Note: For a rundown of where this fic departs from current continuity, see the notes at the end of chapter one. Familiarity with the events of Captain America #25 and Civil War is encouraged.

/ text in italics / denotes radio/cellphone communication via Extremis. # text in italics # denotes news broadcast received via Extremis.

Again, thank you to angelofharmony and tavella for the wonderful beta job.

Chapter Eight

Steve was halfway up the steps to the motel before he realized that Tony was no longer walking behind him. He glanced back over his shoulder to find the other man standing motionless on the sidewalk a few feet away, staring off into space.

"Tony. Tony. Tony." Steve reached out and touched Tony's arm, trying to catch his attention, and Tony turned and blinked at him, his eyes the empty, oily black they turned when he called the armor.

"We're here," Steve said, carefully not meeting that empty stare.

"We're... oh." The black color drained away from Tony's eyes, leaving them the same blue they'd always been. "Sorry. SHIELD team in Hong Kong needed to talk to Fury."

Steve said nothing, settling instead for steering Tony into the building, away from any listening ears. "The Mandarin?" he asked, once the door to their room was safely shut behind them.

Tony shook his head. "The Chinese army says they're garden variety terrorists. The local government has things under control, but if they're mixed up with Red Skull's people, there could be a bio-terrorism threat, and the last thing we need is an outbreak of something there -- their airport's a transportation hub for half of Southeast Asia."

Steve dropped his backpack into the room's lone, faded chair and propped his portfolio -- and his shield -- against the side of the bed, where it would be within easy reach. "But you think it's the Mandarin anyway," he said.

"If not, it's a pretty big coincidence." Tony dropped heavily onto the edge of the bed, and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. "And the Thing says the Fantastic Four are fighting some kind of mole mutates in the Parisian catacombs. Because the Al Qaida cell SHIELD is trying to break up there isn't enough trouble."

"And here I sit in Chelsea." The words were out before Steve really thought about them. He wasn't complaining, not really. He just hated feeling so out of the loop, while Tony sat there with half of SHIELD's communications traffic running through his head. Over the past five days, only one of the Mandarin's men had made an appearance. Steve had made short work of him; he was pretty sure that Tony didn't even know that he'd been there. Steve had made them check out of the Saint Mark's a day early, claiming that the neighborhood was too crowded.

Since then, his job had mostly consisted of reminding Tony to eat.

Tony glanced away, shoulders sagging. "Sorry," he said.

"No, this important too," Steve said. "And anyway, I chose to come." If they had run into another of the Mandarin's men on the street, Tony, distracted as he'd been, wouldn't have noticed until it was far too late. Steve had never seen him blank out like that using the Extremis before this week, but over the past few days, it had become a familiar, if somewhat unsettling, sight.

Steve sat down on the bed beside Tony, resting a hand on his shoulder for a moment, before letting it slide to the center of his back. With Tony's shoulders hunched forward, Steve could feel the hard lines of his ribs all down his back.

Tony turned to look at him, hair half sticking up, half falling over his eyes. "You seem," he started a little hesitantly, "surprisingly comfortable with this."

"I am not comfortable with this," Steve snapped. How could Tony think he was comfortable with this?

Tony looked away, shoulders hunching further.

"I'm not 'comfortable' with the Extremis, and I don't like what it does to you," Steve explained. Whatever Tony might claim, it did do things to him, made him strange and distant. Even if it hadn't influenced his decisions in the fight over registration, Steve still didn't think that it had helped any. And although Steve knew that he was busy relaying communications to hundreds of people, all over the world, it still bothered him how lost in his own head Tony had been over the past few days. "I don't like that all of our communications are reliant on you, and that if anything happens to you, we're all screwed. I don't like that Fury's sending people to snoop around Latveria again. I'm not comfortable with Bucky and Sharon running around DC, torturing people--"

"That wasn't exactly what I meant," Tony said, looking at Steve again, lips quirked with amusement. "I meant," he went on, "you seem surprisingly comfortable with me. And even setting aside the part where we were beating the hell out of each other two months ago, I've never seen you show interest in anyone but women."

Oh. Steve blinked, his building tirade suddenly derailed. Being comfortable with Tony had never been a question, and as for the other... "I saw Captain Blood when I was fourteen," Steve said, smiling at the memory; his mother had sent him to the movies as a treat over Christmas break. "Basil Rathbone wore leather pants. Errol Flynn didn't wear leather, but his pants were very tight."

Tony grinned at him. "So that's why you always liked Clint's Robin Hood movie."

"They both wore tights in that," Steve said. "And Olivia de Havilland wasn't half-bad either."

"I thought that Jean Harlow was the reason Hollywood existed?" Tony said, raising an eyebrow at Steve.

"She was," Steve defended instantly -- he'd been passionately in love with Jean Harlow at age nine, both because she was terribly pretty and because she'd been in color in a movie with lots of aerial dogfights. Sarah Rogers had been considerably less enthused with her, especially once she learned the title of Steve's new favorite movie. "But Errol Flynn was nice, too."

"How about you?" he asked. Revealing his embarrassing teenage crush on a movie star deserved equivalent detail in return. Knowing Tony, his version probably involved Star Wars and Harrison Ford.

"Tiberius Stone, behind the bleachers in the gym." Tony smirked ever-so-slightly at the memory. "We were graduating from high school, and it seemed like an appropriate way to say good-bye."

It seemed like... Steve stared at him. "Tony, you were fourteen when you finished high school."

"I know." Tony shook his head, still smiling. "Thank God all I did was give him a blow job; trying anything more complicated would probably have been really humiliating. By the time we met back up after college we were actually old enough to know what we were doing. Of course, that was before he turned into a sociopath." The smile dropped off his face like a discarded mask, replaced by the slightly-hunted look of guilt he usually got when talking about Tiberius.

"He was always a sociopath," Steve said, frowning. He'd only met Stone once, but that had been more than enough; he could tell within three minutes that Stone was a smarmy bastard who touched Tony far too much. It had been during the middle of a media attack on Tony that had almost driven his company under, and Stone's television channels had been the ones leading the witch hunt. Tony had continued insisting that it was just business, and that Stone was still his friend, even while Stone's people were driving him over the edge. Finding out that Stone had been a deranged sociopathic supervillain all along hadn't surprised Steve in the slightest.

"No," Tony started, "he was different back--" he broke off, cocking his head as if listening, then said, "That was Carol. Simon thinks he was spotted by the Latverian border patrol."

Steve suppressed the desire to swear, settling instead for a groan. "I told Nick. I think the Howling Commandos' unit motto was 'we never learn.'"

"Do you want me to pass that along for you?" Tony asked, with just a flicker of a smile.

"No." Now Doom was sure to lodge some kind of diplomatic complaint with the UN, and SHIELD would be ordered to leave his borders alone. Once upon a time, Steve would have told Nick to counter by pointing out the army of Doombots currently parading around Manhattan, but the UN's policy these days was to pretend that Doombots didn't exist. Sam had always suspected that Doom simply bribed the UN inspection committees. Steve personally thought it was blackmail. It was a favorite tactic for pretty much all the politically-minded supervillains.

Stone had had a flair for it as well. "Have I ever told you how much I hated him?" Steve asked.

Tony looked blank for a moment, scrolling lines of data eerily visible across his irises, then blinked and asked, "Fury? Everyone hated him. He was director of SHIELD, and if I've learned anything over the past month, it's that universal dislike comes with the job."

"Not Fury," Steve corrected him. "Stone." Then, anxious to erase the cold, empty look that had come over Tony's face while he spoke about SHIELD, he slid one hand onto Tony's knee and leaned forward, cupping the other hand around the side of Tony's face and laying a brief kiss on his lips.

Tony leaned into Steve, pressing one hand flat against his chest, and Steve bent his head, kissing the side of Tony's neck. Tony closed his eyes, smiling a little, and began to work at the buttons of Steve's shirt.

He slid the shirt down off Steve's shoulders, leaving him in only his undershirt, and then paused, hands still resting on Steve's arms, tracing small circles against Steve's right shoulder with his thumb. His eyes had gone distant and unfocused again, and for an instant, Steve loathed the Extremis with all his heart, never mind that it was nothing but a bunch of computer code.

"What are you doing?" he asked, trying to sound playful and not like he was silently resenting something that only existed inside Tony's head. "I know my shoulders aren't the most interesting part of me.

Tony blinked, coming back from wherever he'd been, and dropped his hand from Steve's shoulder. "Nothing," he said, looking down.

If Steve had learned one thing from Sharon, it was that 'nothing' never meant nothing. He picked up Tony's hand. "What is it?"

There was a moment of silence as Tony's lips quirked, as if he were trying to smile or think of something to say. Gaze still distant, he reached out with his free hand, touching Steve's shoulder lightly. "You should have a scar there," he said, meeting Steve's eyes with an almost apologetic expression. He trailed his hand down Steve's chest, pausing for a moment. "And one there." His hand came to rest over Steve's stomach. "And one there."

Steve stared at Tony's hand, fingers pressing lightly into his side. "I don't remember that one," he said quietly.

"And that jagged one on your knee that you always had is gone, too," Tony said, catching Steve's eyes, trying to smile. It wasn't an entirely successful attempt, but Steve seized on the new subject with gratitude. That last wound, the one he didn't remember, would have been Sharon's bullet.

"I got that falling off a fire escape when I was eight." Steve smiled ruefully at the memory. His mother had been furious with him. "After that, I stopped playing Robin Hood and stuck to King Arthur."

"Did Errol Flynn wear tights in that movie, too?" Tony asked, arching an eyebrow.

"They never made a King Arthur movie with Errol Flynn." Which, now that Steve thought about it, was a glaring oversight.

"I used to like The Sword in the Stone when I was a kid," Tony said reminiscently. "It was one of the few movies Jarvis would actually watch with me."

"I thought you liked that Grail movie?" Steve asked, nudging Tony with his shoulder. Tony and Peter both loved Monty Python, but Steve had never really been all that fond of them -- he'd always gotten the feeling that there was something he was missing.

Tony grinned. Steve refused to find it endearing. "Let's not talk about that version of Camelot," he said, leaning into Steve's side. "It's a silly place."

Steve rolled his eyes, but smiled anyway, and kissed him.

It had been a while since Sharon had done covert-ops, but her skills were still up to the challenge of getting her inside the Longworth House office building. A photoshopped ID proclaiming her to be a White House aide and a story involving the President's tax cuts bill and the Ways and Means Committee had gotten her past the security guards at the front door, and a set of lockpicks got her into congressional aide Douglas Wheeler's office.

Exactly why the Bush Administration needed hard copy reports from the committee sessions at eight o' clock at night had never been specified, and the guard hadn't asked.

Sharon shut Wheeler's door carefully behind her, re-locked it, and then crossed the cramped office space to open the window over the desk.

Winter Soldier climbed through it, somehow managing to avoid knocking over any of the multiple stacks of paperwork littering Wheeler's desk. Only once he was inside and away from the windows did Sharon pull the blinds and turn on the lights.

Winter Soldier was already sorting through the piles of paperwork, carefully setting each discarded sheet back in its original position when he'd finished with it. "I've got his desk and file drawers," he said, not looking up. "You take the computer."

For all his skill at other forms of espionage, Winter Soldier was practically computer-illiterate. Most of the time, it was oddly amusing to hear a de facto cyborg complain that computers had gone downhill ever since they stopped using punch cards. At the moment, it was just one more mission variable.

Sharon sat carefully in Wheeler's desk chair, ignoring the small sounds of Winter Soldier opening and closing file drawers behind her, and began to boot up Wheeler's computer.

Douglas Wheeler was the chief of staff to New York Congressman Joe Dickstein, a founding member of the Unregistered Superhuman Activities Committee, and one of the heavy hitters behind the Superhuman Registration Act. Dickstein had been a member of several committees tangentially involved in Project Wideawake, was currently a member of the Armed Services committee on terrorism and unconventional threats, and had once worked on a lobbying campaign with Henry Gyrich.

All of which made him well-connected and made his record regarding superhuman affairs decidedly spotty. It didn't necessarily make him useful to their investigation. His aide, on the other hand... Several of the calls made to Agent Taylor's cell phone had come from Wheeler's office. Maybe Wheeler had been getting therapy, but Sharon doubted it. It wouldn't be the first time an employee had used his boss's security clearance to hand out classified information.

Sharon had watched him walk out the Longworth's front door only half an hour ago, and had been surprised by the wave of rage she felt toward him. This prematurely balding lawyer-type in his dark grey suit and wingtip shoes had helped Faustus get inside her head. He had Steve's blood on his hands.

He also had absolutely nothing incriminating on his hard drive, unless the collection of pornographic photos of women wearing latex bodypaint saved in a folder entitled "committee minutes" counted.

No emails sent from anyone outside the Capitol Hill server, no drafts of letters sent to Faustus, no A.I.M. affiliates or American Nazi Party hate sites in his history of visited websites. Nothing but meeting minutes, drafts of letters to lobbyists about funding bills, files full of background information for various recently-introduced bills (immigration, budget appropriations, motions to honor various casualties of the War on Terror), and .pdf copies of speeches. Sharon scrolled through the "My Documents" folder, past copies of Dickstein's commemorative speeches on the five-year anniversary of 9/11, until she found a handful of potentially useful documents. Wheeler's email address book. Saved copies of inter-office memos from Dickstein. A list of addresses for campaign funding donors.

Wheeler's government-issue PC was all sleek black plastic with a cutting-edge flat screen, but its USB port was inconveniently located on the back of the computer tower. She had to crawl under the desk, nearly sneezing at the dust that permeated the thin green carpet, before she could download all of Wheeler's maybe/possibly useful files onto a SHIELD flash drive.

Across the office, Winter Soldier shut a file drawer -- very gently -- and held up a single sheet of paper. "I've got what I need," he said quietly, voice toneless in the way of someone trying very hard to suppress anger. "Let's go."

Sharon took the paper from him and tucked it in her document folder -- brown leather tastefully stamped with the White House seal -- then shut down the computer and turned out the lights.

The Winter Soldier climbed soundlessly out the window again, and Sharon closed and latched it behind him. She left the building the same way she'd come in, through the front door. The security guard waved to her on the way out.

Twenty-five minutes later, she was sitting at a table at The Monocle with a ten-dollar glass of Cabernet Sauvignon at her elbow, the flash drive full of stolen data in her pocket, and the document folder tucked safely between her feet.

James showed up five minutes past their scheduled meeting time, rainwater beading on his black leather jacket and dripping from the ends of his hair.

"You're late," Sharon told him, not getting up. "I already ordered for you."

"Got caught in the rain," he said, shrugging. The black leather combat gear and domino mask had been traded in for a grey dress shirt and black slacks with cuffs almost-but-not-quite long enough to conceal the SHIELD-issue leather boots he was still wearing. No blazer. No tie. It was formal enough to get him through the door, but only by a small margin. "What am I eating?"

"You're having filet mignon with merlot sauce. I'm having shrimp with spring asparagus."

"No crab?"

"It's March. Soft-shell season doesn't start until May."

James dropped smoothly into the empty chair across from her and reached for a dinner roll, his ungloved hand gleaming dully in the candle-light. "I ate here once back in the 70s, when I had an assignment in the state department. They had crab then."

"It was summer then, if you're talking about the assignment I think you are." Sharon pulled the document folder from under her chair and laid it on the table. "Let's see if you found something more useful than I did."

"Oh, I found 'something,' all right," James said, dropping all pretense of playfulness. "Wheeler needs to learn not to keep his boss's memos."

Sharon opened the folder and, without removing the paper inside – which was decorated with a conspicuous 'Office of Rep. Joseph Dickstein' letterhead – began to read. The message, dated a day before Steve's death, was brief. "Tell Sudler the appointment is at 2:30, Wednesday the 8th, city courthouse." It had been written in blue ballpoint, and signed with a scrawled "Joe."

It was the date and time of Steve's arraignment, information that had been restricted even from most SHIELD agents until a few hours beforehand. It could have been a co-incidence. And Sharon could have been her high school homecoming queen.

Dickstein had given someone out there a twenty-four hour advance notice of Steve's first public appearance post-arrest, or Sharon was going to eat Cindy Andrews' tiara when her fifteen-year reunion came up next month.

"Dickstein is our leak."

"He's not going to be leaking anything else," James said grimly. "I can see to that." He closed the fingers of his metal hand, crushing the dinner roll as if he were imagining it was Dickstein.

Sharon shook her head. Satisfying as the thought was… "James, we can't assassinate a U.S. congressman, no matter how much he may deserve it." She looked back down at the note. Something about the name Sudler seemed familiar. And it was handwritten rather than emailed; had Dickstein wanted to avoid leaving an electronic record?

She suggested as much to James, and his lips curved into a smirk. "If that's his goal, he needs to talk to his aide about his compulsive inability to throw anything away. The guy kept receipts for office supplies going back three years."

"And yet his hard drive was completely clutter free." Well, except for the photos of naked women painted blue. "Somebody's learned their lesson from Oliver North."

James raised his eyebrows questioningly. "Who?"

"It's not important." She frowned down at the note, absently tapping it with one finger. "I've seen that name somewhere before. Hold on a second."

Sharon reached for her purse and dug through it for her PDA, then plugged the flash-drive full of Wheeler's computer files into it. "Email addresses, uselessly sanitized email records, campaign donations... Here." She spun the device around and pushed it across the table toward James. "Three months ago, just before the Registration Act went to a vote, Dickstein received a twenty-five thousand dollar campaign donation from a Mr. L. K. Sudler." A hell of a lot more money than thirty pieces of silver, but there had been a lot of inflation since Biblical times. "And, of course," she went on, "when you re-arrange the letters in L. K. Sudler, you get-"

James' eyes narrowed, and even without the domino mask, in clothes that were almost nice, he looked like the assassin he was. "Red Skull."

Steve's head was a warm, heavy weight against Tony's shoulder, and the even sounds of his breathing were the only noise in the room. Tony had long since ceased to notice it, as he had stopped registering the voices of the couple in the next room over, and the sounds of the traffic on the street outside. He was "listening" to something else now, and aural sensory input only got in the way.

Tony had once described the effects of his modified dose of Extremis as "growing new connections." It had been as good a way as any to explain what he'd wanted it to do -- allow him to control the armor directly, the way the now-too-dangerous neural interfaces had let him -- but the end result was more complicated than that, less a "connection" and more a deluge of new sensory input, with the armor a steady presence underneath it.

He wondered, occasionally, if this was how telepaths felt.

He could shut the background noise of satellite transmissions and data feeds out almost entirely when he had to (except for the armor -- the armor was always there) but for the past four days he'd been running with filters wide open 24/7, not daring to shut anything out even when he slept. The constant "noise" gave him a low-grade headache, which intensified when he focused in on a particular feed, as he was doing now.

/Doombots sighted in Central Park, sir./

Lovely. Tony opened up the communications channel to the New Avengers, and then, for good measure, opened the ones that would link him to the NYPD, fire department, and all the SHIELD field agents currently present in Manhattan. Maybe Thor had had the right idea back when he'd wanted to wipe Latveria off the map. /More specific please, agent,/ he sent to the original contact. /Where in Central Park, and how many?/

/The southern end, by 59th Street. Four, no, five of them. I'd take a closer look, but I'm running low on fuel./

The helo pilot included a video transmission, a grainy overhead shot of five green-cloaked figures, nearly invisible against the green backdrop of the park. Tony streamed the image file to the Helicarrier's communication's center, tagging it with the bit of code that would set off the priority alarms, and then turned his attention to the Avengers' channel. /Luke,/ he said, /Five Doombots at West 59th Street, southern edge of Central Park./

/Got it./ Peter's voice came back over the channel instead of Luke's, but that took care of one dispatch.

# Rioting continues in Southern Los Angeles today, in the wake of yet another small-scale explosion...# The CNN anchor's mindlessly perky smile was distracting, so Tony cut that feed to audio only.

/She Hulk,/ he switched open Jen's channel; she and Ares were handling things in Los Angeles, but the continued attacks were complicating things. /What's your status?/

/We need more men here, and soon./ Even through the comlink, Jen's exhaustion and exasperation came through loud and clear. /Every time people start to settle down, something else blows up, or falls down, or someone says something stupid in a public place, and everyone starts hitting each other all over again. SHIELD agents, Avengers, the Goddamn Coast Guard. A show of strength isn't enough, we need enough people to force order here until things finally settle down./

/I'll see about redirecting some SHIELD agents from DC,/ Tony promised her. Between Jan, Bob, Falcon, a number of SHIELD agents, and Fury's covert team, the situation in DC, at least, had finally started to improve -- as far as terrorist attacks went, anyway. Congress wasn't exactly happy with the situation, and it was hard to say whether they were more upset about the Doombots, or Jan's attempts to explain why SHIELD had suddenly decided to stop enforcing registration. Tony was leaning towards the latter; in his experience, perspective wasn't a strong point with most politicians.

There was a sudden change in temperature, and the weight of Steve's head on his shoulder was gone. Tony shut down all non-essential datafeeds and dragged his attention back to his surroundings. Steve was half-sitting-up, weight resting on his elbows, staring at the far wall. The dim glow from the street lights outside offered Tony only his silhouette, hiding whatever expression he might be wearing.

He shouldn't have mentioned Steve's absent scars earlier. Steve had made no mention of nightmares, but when he jerked awake this way at least once a night, to lie there breathing in gasps or staring motionless at the ceiling, he didn't have to. Bringing up the reason behind the dreams couldn't have been helpful.

Tony could think of nothing useful to offer, but he asked anyway. "Do you want to talk about it?" And then, when Steve's only response was an abrupt shake of his head, "Is there anything I can-"

"No," Steve interrupted quietly. "It will stop eventually. It did last time." He rubbed at his face with one hand, then lay back again, settling against Tony's side. "So," he said, in a slightly louder and deliberately calm voice, "what is everyone doing right now?"

"Luke's team is fighting Doombots in Central Park," Tony told him. "And Jen is having trouble in LA."

"And DC?"

"Jan's group is still trying to argue for a temporary suspension of Registration. Sam and Redwing found a bomb on the roof of the Capitol Building, and they still haven't figured out how it got there. The Pentagon is pushing to have the President declare a state of national emergency, so they can deploy the National Guard wherever the next attack occurs, without waiting for individual state governors to do it..." He rambled on for a couple of minutes, and Steve listened silently. "I don't know what Agent Carter and Winter Soldier are doing," he admitted, finally. "He's got a direct communications uplink to Fury, outside the SHIELD network." He knew they must be Steve's main concern, but the only contact he'd had with them was the handful of updates he'd sent Agent Carter.

Steve rolled onto his stomach, wrapping an arm around Tony, face pressed against the crook of Tony's neck. It should have felt claustrophobic, especially since Steve was heavy enough that there was now no way for Tony to move. Instead, it was strangely comforting. And even if it hadn't been, Tony wasn't going to deny Steve something he wanted or needed, not when it was this easy to give to him. Possibly, he was never going to deny him anything, ever again.

Tony began to stroke Steve's hair absently. Summarizing all of the data streams he was handling was too much effort, so he picked one at random and started to recite it. "One of SHIELD's agents in Iraq says to tell Fury that he's found a possible Al-Qaida cell in Mosul, and that the Army is going to take it from there, and that he hates the Army, and that Fury is a bastard because he used to be in the Army, and he's glad Fury is back because the new guy had his head up his ass, and I don't think he realizes who he's talking to."

Steve made an amused sound, lips curving for a second. Tony continued, verbatim. "Hong Kong airport security intercepted a passenger with pneumonic plague trying to board a flight to mainland China, should we treat it as a possible bio-terrorism attempt? I'm telling her yes. She wants to know if she should pass the warning along to the Chinese government, or if she should continue to stay beneath their radar. Dugan wants a map with the Doombot attacks plotted on it, and oh, hell." He broke off, staring at the map he'd pulled up on one of the Extremis's mental "screens."

59th Street, 45th Street, the Financial district. The three major Doombot attacks formed a lopsided triangle, each one just outside the edges of... "They have Hell's Kitchen triangulated."

"Call Nelson and Murdock," Steve mumbled into Tony's chest. He sounded half-asleep, and not only because they usually pretended that they didn't all know exactly who Daredevil was.

Tony closed his eyes -- visual input was distracting -- and immersed himself completely in the stream of communications data again. Even with the onslaught of information pushing physical sensation to the background, he could still feel Steve's heavy weight on top of him. It more than made up for the headache.

As always, thanks to everyone who reviewed, favorites-listed, or otherwise commented on or encouraged us over the past seven chapters.