Bruce and Clint were leaning tiredly on the counter. None of the Avengers had slept last night. Tony was off showering somewhere nearby and Natasha was stalking around the kitchen. No one was going very far from the kitchen. It had the doorway to elevator. If someone came in that was the way they would come.
"So what are you and Tony going to do now?" Clint asked.
Bruce looked up out of his mostly sleeping daze. "Huh? Oh." He took a breath. "Well we still need to reverse engineer it."
"You're going to make it again?" Natasha asked staring at the freezer. "How will that help? You two going to stick the needle under Clint's skin and see what it does?"
Clint made a face at her. He kind of wanted to just go back to his freaking nest. It was warmer up there and he would be the first to see if either blonde Avenger was back.
Bruce shook his head. "No. We can try to identify the different components coming together in the serum. What we did was simply."
"We threw stuff in with the poison until we found the right combination with bodily fluids and heat to turn it to harmless stuff like water." Tony came back in with his hair still slick and wet. He had run his fingers through it until it stuck up like a grass lawn.
"Sounds like fun." Clint grumbled.
"But." Bruce continued as the inventor sat down. "We still don't know what it could have done. It has some reacting agents that we've never seen before. So much so that one little injection could have done massive amounts of harm. It could have done anything from given Steve a little stomach ache to turning him into a midge fly."
"What's a midge fly?" Natasha asked.
Tony ignored them all nursing his cup of coffee and tapping around on his Starkpad. Lots of cleanup news. Expect people to be late. Some train was stuck on the tracks somewhere. He had an Email from Fury. Ignore. Hey what's this?
"It's a small fly. They are quite annoying." Bruce said.
Natasha opened her mouth to respond.
"It's alive!" Tony yelled.
"What?" Natasha asked.
"Steve?" Clint said scrambling over.
Tony shook his head. "That little puppy that got hit by a car." He stood excitedly and turned the frame to show them.
There in a small space were over a hundred pictures of two dogs. An old, old German Shepard and an extremely young and beat up looking Golden Retriever-like puppy. They pictured the big dog leading the way and the little pup trailing along behind. Then the more recent pictures showed the sleepy little thing being carried. The page was captioned "Present Looks to the Past for a Guide."
Bruce started reading out loud. "As New Yorkers come back to their various regions after another in a series of awful attacks we see that humans are not the only ones impacted. The heartbreakingly sweet little puppy was nearly killed during the attack yesterday and picked up by a rather strange friend. This friend is not only old but male as well. Experts say it is rare that male dogs ever pick up younger dogs but New York is full of strange creatures. Everyone here at the printing press joins the people in wishing the master and his student good luck."
The pad kept automatically updating so you could almost watch the German Shepard walking with the pup swinging from his mouth. It made all of the Avengers smile widely.
Comments kept stacking up quickly.
"Who owns those dogs?"
"Can I adopt them both? :P 3"
"God Bless the USA! Thanks to the new icons of New York recovery!"
"Who the f*** left their dogs in town?"
"OMG! I love dogs! I encourage people to put food out for them!"
"They look like they know exactly where they need to go and exactly when they will get there. We in New York need to follow their example. Set your goals and do anything possible to achieve them."
Tony finally broke the silence. "We should get a dog."
Natasha looked at him. "You hate fur. You don't even get near dogs even when they are friendly."
There had been an incident before when Steve had really wanted to go into a pet shop for the first time.
"Steve always wanted a dog." Clint put in. "A big one."
"How do you know that?" Tony asked a little more harshly than was necessary.
Clint shook it off. They were starting to learn each other's patterns for high stress situations. "That is another advantage of being up high." He smirked. "You can see what Captain Liberty likes to draw."
Tony huffed. "I can just ask Jarvis that." He said.
"We should get a dog." Bruce agreed. "I had one a while passed when I was on the run. He was a good old dog. A German Shepard cross breed."
"What happened to him?" Natasha asked.
Bruce smiled slightly. "A boy in the village took him in when I had to run again. The guys chasing me tranqed him and apparently he was very distressed and went running to find someone who still had my scent on them. The boy, Klin, was one of the better ones he could have met."
"I feel like there is something funny about those dogs though." Tony said looking at the pictures. "Hey Jarvis, zoom in on the big one's head there."
"Right away sir." The polite mechanical voice chimed.
One of the images appeared on the big screen and zoomed in a lot so it was fuzzy.
"Now clear it up."
The image sharpened. Every flack of hair and dust became visible to them. The main focus was the ear of the older dog.
"Look!" Clint pointed. "He's got a number tagged and tattooed on the inside of his ear. A blue one, like from an auction or something."
"Or something would be correct. That is not an auction tag." Tony said. "I've met been introduced to these bad boys before. Maybe not this particular one but, their handlers had a great time showing them off. I don't know what he's doing with a pup but that"
He whipped up another picture showing a massive German Shepard, all armored and ready for work. Another was jumping up showing off all of its pearly white teeth. Another was grabbing the black cushion around the arm of a man. All of them wore thick black Kevlar vests over them with the same white letters down the sides.
"Is a New York City Police Patrol dog."