A/N Thank you for the reviews and follows. To clarify, this is set a couple of months after the end of the movie.
Chapter Two
The night passed extraordinarily slowly for Steve.
Initially, he checked out the limits of what was, effectively, his prison cell: Unable to use the elevators, he found he could move from floor to floor among the residential and team floors of the tower via the staircases but found he was stopped abruptly from descending down to the office floors by some kind of invisible barrier. As Yustis had said, he was able to easily pass through the internal walls, though oddly he found he still naturally migrated to the doorways through force of habit, but attempts to push through the external walls saw him met by the same barrier that prevented him descending the stairs.
He paid a visit to the additional gym Tony had added during the rebuild specifically for him. The modern, technologically advanced equipment of the main gym had been eschewed in favour of more traditional accoutrements and reinforced beams to hold his specially designed punching bags: All gone.
Steve was saddened by the sight, it was one of the few places he'd felt truly at ease in his new world and now there stood just an empty room.
It figured, you couldn't remove rooms from the Tower without replacing them with something, but clearly the Time Guardians (he had no idea what they called themselves but that would do as a name until he had a chance to find out) thought it sufficient to just empty them and assume most humans wouldn't worry about it: As a broad generalisation of modern humans they would probably be right but Steve couldn't help wondering if they might have underestimated the Avengers; they were, after all, hardly typical.
Steve couldn't help but think how Tony's kindness in creating that place for him during the redesign of the tower had been a welcome gesture and a reminder that the man was a lot more than he generally showed and certainly more than Steve himself had originally assumed – although his attempts at expressing his gratitude to his host for the thought had been rebuffed in a way that only served to confuse his opinion once again.
He spent the remainder of the night at the large floor-to-ceiling window in the main lounge, looking out over the city skyline before him, he tried to rid himself of the image of it burned and ruined beyond recognition without success.
Maybe that was how it was supposed to be? Maybe humans had relinquished their right to exist through their constant fighting one another and it was time for them to move on as the dinosaurs had before them? For a brief moment, Steve considered that he'd had no right to be there and disrupt the ordained fate of the planet….but he swiftly dismissed that line of thought: It wasn't in his nature to give credence to that kind of thinking: That the human race deserved its place in the universe was non-negotiable as far as he was concerned and he knew within himself that he would endure whatever pain it caused him to continue his existence in this century if it meant that place was preserved.
He tried to remember everything anyone had told him back in 1942 about the anticipated effects of the serum: He felt reasonably sure that no-one had had any inkling that, under a very specific set of circumstances it could cause him to go into suspended animation – surely that made him innocent of the accusation? But how could he prove it? He couldn't be absolutely certain what anyone 70 years ago really knew or thought. He wondered if the Court would say that ignorance did not excuse guilt, maybe he could strike a bargain and voluntarily surrender his existence after the Battle of Manhattan after the portal had been closed?
He thought back to Yustis' remark during the hearing about his existence being suppressed when he was summoned which effectively meant no-one had missed him for as long as he'd been gone, however long that was. He tried to remember what he had been doing and, eventually, it came to him: He'd been in the car with Tony on the way to the jet, they'd been summoned to some kind of conference and were due to be gone for around 24 hours.
He recalled that neither of them had been looking forward to it. Whilst they were now generally able to maintain basic civility towards one another most of the time, they were hardly what you might call friends. Tony had spent the entire journey on his phone and Steve had looked out of the window hoping to spot a familiar location or building: Steve laughed mirthlessly at the thought that the Time Guardians could have saved themselves the time and trouble of suppressing his existence, Tony was so engrossed in whatever he was doing he probably wouldn't have noticed if Steve had grown a second head let alone disappeared.
He wondered whether that was yesterday or, indeed, it could have been weeks ago for all he knew. Without access to any of the means by which he would normally check the time and date he had no other choice but to wait for the others, whoever was there, to wake up.
Finally, when the sun was already pouring into the lounge, he heard movement in the vicinity of the bedrooms. He rose from his seat at the window and made his way to the kitchen knowing that was always the first stop in the mornings for the tower residents.
A sleepy-looking Clint shuffled in, scratching his head and yawning: He looked straight at the coffee-maker, empty and not yet cleaned from yesterday. His face bore a look of frustration. He halted so suddenly Natasha almost walked into the back of him.
"Jarvis, why is there no coffee?" Clint's tone was confused.
"Presumably because no-one's made it…" Natasha supplied helpfully making her way to the fridge and pouring herself a juice.
"Jarvis?" Clint asked again.
"I am unable to supply an answer to that question Sir." Jarvis replied, a distinct tone of discomfort evident in the statement.
"But there's always coffee," Clint was pretty much whining. "We come in and the coffee-maker's clean and the coffee's made. Who does it Jarvis?"
"As I already stated, I am unable to supply an answer to that question. I am attempting to locate the information but it is not there." Jarvis sounded positively…concerned. "I shall run a full diagnostic to determine why that data is unavailable."
Clint and Natasha exchanged worried glances. There was no way anything could happen in the tower without Jarvis being aware of it.
"At least I'm good for something," Steve thought. It was his morning ritual after his run to clean the coffee-maker and set it going for the morning's supply. He batted desolately at the machine with his hand and saw it pass straight through the familiar gadget.
Clint's initial reaction was to scowl at the coffee-maker and wait for the mystery operator to turn up and do the job – his face a picture of abject misery. Natasha chuckled at his expression but was as mystified as he was: How was it neither of them knew who habitually made the coffee?
Things didn't get any better when Bruce finally strolled in. Engrossed in a science paper he snatched a mug from the shelf and placed it on the counter then simply lifted the coffee pot from its perch without even looking and attempted to pour from the empty, dirty jug for several seconds before it occurred to him nothing was coming out.
He looked around questioningly only to be met by blank looks from the other occupants of the kitchen.
It was finally decided that, bizarre as it may seem, it MUST be Tony who usually makes the coffee (after all, Thor wasn't there a lot of the time and he was an absolute menace with kitchen equipment) so Clint and Bruce set to in an attempt to resolve their caffeine crisis. It took a while – as with everything Tony owned, the coffee maker was the most sophisticated money could buy and suitably complicated as a result - but they finally managed to get a rather anaemic-looking brew filtering through to the jug (which they forgot to wash): The grimaces which met the finished product suggested it wasn't up to the standards they'd come to expect.
There had been many times since waking up in the 21st Century when Steve had felt lost, useless or lonely but on this occasion he experienced all three sensations simultaneously: Natasha had given up on breakfast and, having finished her normal ration of cereal and juice, went to the gym; Clint stared in the fridge at the abundant supplies of bacon and eggs and remembered having that as his regular breakfast before wondering (loudly) how it was they ever got cooked as neither he nor Bruce knew the location of the pans.
Jarvis, when asked, advised that he was still running the diagnostic and that he was unable to supply any further information on the identity of the mysterious breakfast cook: He was, however, able to direct them to the location of the pans – in light of the coffee debacle they declined.
"I guess this is what it's like to be a ghost – not existing at all is probably a whole lot less frustrating" Steve mused, immediately feeling guilty for that thought remembering that there was a high degree of likelihood that if that were the case the two people he was looking at and most of the rest of the population of New York would probably be dead.
He had started to long for Yustis to come back just for someone to talk to when he considered how many breakfasts he'd cooked where he'd barely exchanged more than six words with the two men currently having to make do with cereal and toast – and most of those words had consisted of nothing more complex than "more?", "coffee?" and "thanks". "Don't know what I'm getting so uptight about, I'm not sure I was even existing before" he thought miserably.
Tony was irritable.
As Happy ferried him back to the tower he realised he'd spent the last 24 hours being the "Face of the Avengers" and throughout the entire time he'd had the feeling that wasn't how it was supposed to be, like he'd forgotten something important.
In truth, Tony "forgot" stuff all the time (meetings he didn't want to go to, birthdays or other celebrations he could easily make up for with an expensive present, pretty much anything official involving the Government or SHIELD) but it was almost invariably on purpose because he had something more important or interesting he wanted to do and had very little desire to remember the thing in the first place: This didn't feel like he'd forgotten a thing, it was as if he'd forgotten how things were meant to be and, more worryingly still, no-one else seemed to have noticed.
As a rule Tony didn't do feelings; he did awkward, niggling, unable to pinpoint, suspicious feelings even less: And when those kind of feelings persisted for as long as these had it left him feeling irritable and more than a little disquieted!