Chapter 11: Die Another Day

Nat and Steve reached the coordinates early on their fourth day out, before the sun was up. There was some type of small Soviet-era compound hidden in the trees, its chain link fence covered in vines. It might have been abandoned but for the lights that were visible through the building's mean little windows.

They lay on their stomachs in the dead undergrowth on top of a small ridge, peering down at the squat concrete buildings through their binoculars. "We're going to have to get in really close," Steve said in a hushed tone. "Visibility is terrible. We might have to play Peeping Tom to see anything useful at all."

"It would be easy to get to the windows at night," Nat reasoned. "The fence isn't electrified, and there's good cover all the way up to its base."

They rested their chins on their folded arms, waiting and watching, as dawn spread weakly across the sky. The sun made it over the horizon, its cold light creeping through the grey trees.

"Do you see that?" Steve asked suddenly, grabbing Nat's arm. For an instant, the angle of light was just right, illuminating something strange, an area of distortion along the ground, like a strip of heat haze. But the sun kept climbing, and the shivering stripe disappeared, gone again in a blink.

"I saw it," Nat assured him. She didn't look happy about it, either.

"What the hell was it?" Steve asked, unnerved.

"I don't know. Something we weren't supposed to see."

"Was it a…a force field?" Steve mused. "Is that a real thing?"

"You're asking the wrong Avenger. All I know is that I don't like it. Something isn't right, Cap."

"No," he agreed.

Around eight am, two older model snowmobiles made an appearance. The pair of riders wore military style rifles and light tactical, nothing high tech or fancy. They left the vehicles idling after they dismounted. A door opened in what appeared to be the primary building, and two more men emerged; it looked for all the world like a shift change. Sure enough, the men from inside left on the snowmobiles, leaving the new guys to take their places.

"So what do you think? You seen enough?" Steve asked, turning to Nat with a rueful smile.

"Sure have," Nat agreed. "Look at that crumbling Soviet-era facility protected by a mere two guys. Let's just take 'em out now. Couldn't take more than 15 minutes." They couldn't hold the bit together longer than that, and burst into shoulder-shaking silent laughter.

When they'd recovered themselves, Nat said, "But seriously, no way I'm going down there. That's a trap."

They waited to move until nightfall, creeping through dense brush to hide their tracks. When the snow started up again, light but steady, they abandoned the thick cover in favor of moving as fast and as far as possible while the snow was covering their footprints.

"Think they'll send someone after us when they realize we aren't going to just knock on the door?" Steve asked as he trailed Nat through the darkness.

"Of course. Wouldn't you? They know we're out here somewhere. It's a slim chance they'll stumble over us, but it'd be worth a shot. They might get lucky."

"Yeah," Steve agreed. "Hope this outfit doesn't issue a rabbit's foot along with the rifle."

Their own luck ran out in the mid-morning. They heard the snowmobile before they saw it, but it was traveling fast, and the forest was sparse in this area; there simply wasn't anywhere to hide. They settled for either side of a large tree. Steve readied his shield for a throw, and Nat drew a high caliber pistol and moved into firing stance.

Probably because the trap at the compound had been so heavy handed, Nat and Steve were surprised by what happened next. The noisy snowmobile provided the perfect cover for and distraction from a second combatant traveling on foot. Just as the snowmobile came roaring into range, a shot rang out through the trees. Nat pivoted and dropped the gunman before he squeezed off a second. Steve had just hurled the shield at the snowmobile when he heard the two successive rounds. His ears pricked towards the cracks, but he kept his eyes trained on the shield. It sheared the rider off the sled: he hit the ground heavily, rolled several times, and then remained unmoving in the snow. The snowmobile trundled neatly to a halt while the shield slammed into the ground, ripping a furrow through the snow like a crash-landing UFO. It came to a stop sticking halfway out of a drift. Only then did Steve glance over at Nat; she was edging towards her fallen mark, gun drawn, but Steve knew from the massive spread of blood under the body what she would find.

He drew his own sidearm and took a step towards his downed target. Or…no. He didn't. He hadn't drawn his gun. He hadn't done anything. Two deep lines, one on either side of his nose, creased Steve's forehead as his brows pinched together. Without warning, he fell onto his knees, sinking heavily into the powdery snow. He pitched forward face first; the best he could do to protect his face from the impact was to turn his cheek when his arms proved unwilling to check his fall.

The pain as he hit the ground was so great he couldn't even scream, so all encompassing that it sucked away every atom of oxygen from his lungs. Every fiber of his being was concentrated on processing his terrible new reality, and there was no energy for anything else.

And then, somehow, he was on his back, staring up into the flat grey expanse of winter sky. A hand slapped him across the face hard enough to mark. "Ow," he said mildly, "don't do that." The lesser pain from the blow was, weirdly, enough to redirect his attention from the total agony he was now beginning to identify with his shoulder.

"You want the good news or the bad news, Cap?" Nat asked. She wasn't looking at him; her hands were flying across his chest, trailing ribbons of white gauze. She rammed the bandages through the hole in his jacket and into the hole that was evidently in him. When her fingers breached his body, he screamed, and the grey sky began to go white. A second slap arrived across the opposite cheek.

"Good news or bad news?" she asked again. "You have to pick."

"Good news," he said, clawing his way back from the abyss. "I'm a good news guy."

"The good news is that you aren't going to bleed out. The bullet missed the major artery."

"That is good news," he agreed. "Bad news?"

"You got shot."

"Right."

"And you can't pass out. Do you understand? I'm sorry, but you absolutely cannot pass out. It's a bitch, but there it is." Her face was deadly serious, absent any of its usual cool irony.

"Okay," he wheezed. He couldn't, he realized, get a full breath. He sucked in a big gulp of cold air, but the full expansion of his lungs moved the shoulder too much, and the burst of pain made it so he couldn't breathe at all. His eyes rolled with animal panic.

"Hey, hey. Look at me," Nat's hands moved to either side of his face, directing his gaze to her own. "We're going to be fine. I used the sat phone, and a bird is coming to pick us up, but we have to move. We have to take the sled to a place they can set down. Ready? On my mark: one, two, three."

He groaned as she hoisted him to sitting, then heaved him to his feet with her shoulders under his good arm. He concentrated on keeping the air flow trickling in and out slowly through his nose as they staggered together to the snowmobile.

"Wait," he said weakly, his face turning towards the place where his shield had ripped the ground.

"I've got it, Cap," Nat assured him. "Everything is on the sled except you."

With effort, he slung a leg over the seat. When Nat climbed on in front of him, he forced himself to hold up at least some of his own weight, though every ounce of him was trying to slump down on top of her. He felt some kind of strap pass around his waist, binding the two of them together.

"Listen," she said over her shoulder, "I'm serious. You cannot pass out. If you fall off, you're taking me with you. You can lean against me all you want, but you have to center your mass. Put your good arm around my waist and grip, just like that. I'm paying attention to that pressure, Cap. That's how I know you're still awake back there. The bird's picking us thirty miles from here. Can you stay with me that long?"

"Yes," he said, mustering his willpower to the goal.

"Then here we go. Let's play a game," she shouted at him over the engine. "I want you to tell me every bad word you know in French. Say 'em loud, like you mean it."

So he cursed her in French and then in German. He recited the alphabet backwards, forwards, and in halting Russian. He did not pass out, though he drifted close a couple of times. Once, he skirted right up to the black edge and could feel himself slipping over when Tony appeared, snapping bloody fingers in his face and saying, "Earth to Captain America!"

The helicopter was already on the ground when they arrived, med team at the ready. Almost before the snowmobile stopped, hands began pulling at him, unbuckling whatever was strapping him to Nat's back, hoisting him, tugging him, pushing him. He felt like a rag doll being played with by too many kids at once. When the hands finally let him be, he was flat on his back again, looking up at the undersides of unknown chins. For a moment, he could feel a biting draft; winter air sliced across his skin where someone was cutting through his clothes with a pair of scissors. He wanted them to stop, for it all to stop, but he was too tired and hurt too much to complain. He was freezing cold now, naked from the waist up. There was the pinch of a needle in the crook of his arm, and then nothing.

Tony looked at himself in the bathroom mirror with dismay. He looked like shit. He'd barely been sleeping anyway, and then not at all in the days since the Thanksgiving phone call. His bed was too lonely and too big and he could do entirely too much thinking there, so he'd just stopped visiting. When he did sleep, he did it in the shop. When he didn't, he worked.

Bruce was also up all hours now, throwing everything at extragen in some attempt to break it down. Pepper had given up trying to enforce a curfew. She didn't seem to be sleeping too well herself.

But even Tony could see that the bags under his eyes were becoming alarming, and he was starting to lose weight. The curves were giving way to something more angular. He was tense all the time. He had to do something. In his experience, just one full night of sleep was often enough to break the cycle of mania, and he'd decided tonight was the night. He was going to give sleep a real shot before throwing himself on Bruce's mercy and begging for sleeping pills, though he knew neither Bruce nor Pepper would be enthusiastic about his desperate appeal, not with the amount he'd been drinking.

He took a hot shower, poured a stiff one, then climbed in bed early wearing Steve's white t-shirt and nothing else. Propped up against the pillows, he sipped his scotch, considering just what to do next. He had to have an orgasm. Absolutely had to. The tension was going to kill him otherwise. He thought about bringing up Steve's dick pic on his phone, but the night surrounding it made it too guilt-inducing to enjoy. Porn was a possibility, but—with a sudden inspiration, he got his phone and pulled up the website for the Louvre archives. The website was in French, so it took him a few tries to get the search terms just right, but in a few minutes, he had the whole digitized Steve Rogers collection. He skipped over the black and whites from the 1940s, at least for now, and the sketchbook files, and went straight for the photos from the class trip.

There was a particular picture he wanted to see, one he specifically remembered being taken. He scrolled: The five of them trailing up a grand staircase towards Winged Victory. Barton with a statue of Artemis. Nat in front of Ingres' Jeanne d'Arc. Bruce in a hall of Egyptian sarcophagi. And then there it was: he and Steve standing beside a Roman marble.

Steve had on a blue sweater that turned his eyes the color of the ocean. Tony was in a pinstripe blazer and tinted glasses, the lenses the exact same shade as the light from the arc reactor. For once, Tony was actually looking at the art, a statue of a naked woman on a cushioned mattress, or at least, that's what it seemed to be. It was the same sculpture Cap had been sketching on American Experience. Tony's face, mouth slightly agape, hand to cheek, was the perfect expression of surprise. Steve was gesturing at the artwork, but his eyes were cut towards Tony, gauging Tony's degree of shock with amusement. The statue, as Steve was gleefully pointing out, wasn't biologically female at all, but a hermaphrodite, with all of a woman's soft curves and a full set of male genitalia besides. This was after Tony had proclaimed the Roman marbles to be, 'eh, seen one, seen 'em all.'

The incident had secured Tony something like a first date: a promise from Steve to take him to the Met to see some other 'boring' ancient artwork, which had turned into an hours-long excursion focused on the more pornographic artifacts peppering the collection. The museum visit had tumbled into dinner and then a trial-balloon kiss outside of Steve's apartment building. Steve hadn't shot him down; Tony was on a roll, not that it lasted.

They went out for months before anything meaningfully physical happened. While Tony had always been excellent at talking people into bed, he found himself unbelievably chickenshit when it came to Steve Rogers. Everything about Steve, at least in those early days, kept Tony on his best behavior: Steve was so polite, and Tony was falling very fast and very hard, and did not, under any circumstances, want to fuck it up. Who knew the pace of relationships in the forties? Didn't people sit around in the parlor for a year holding hands or something? Ultimately, it was Steve who had taken charge. During a conversation that had felt less probable to Tony than the resurrection of the dodo, Steve put a significant hand on Tony's thigh and promised Tony that, if he made a move, it was going to be a sure thing.

They'd proceeded to make out on the couch and jack each other off in Steve's bed in the most joyfully adolescent way possible. It was one of Tony's favorite memories, one he'd picked over and masturbated to a billion times. Sure, there had been much better sex later, but as far as first times went, it was exceptionally fun: messy, spontaneous, and gleefully juvenile.

Tony knew from Esquire or GQ or whatever classy/trashy magazine he'd looked at in an airport lounge that the brain was the largest sexual organ, and that women in particular needed cerebral stimulation, and god dammit, he was trying, thinking his way through every second of their first sexual encounter, from the smell of the leather sofa, to the warm analog of the HiFi, to the salt taste of sweat on Steve's throat. In an act of desperation, Tony even pulled up the dick pic so he could hold a more fine-grained image of Steve's cock in his mind; this turned out to be a mistake, as the picture made him even guiltier than he'd imagined.

But masturbation with his new parts was just so hard. Or not hard, which was the problem. It was vexing, because Tony did know his way under the hood (so to speak): give him a good hour with any given pussy, and he could probably leave the customer satisfied, except, apparently, when he was the fucking customer. He marched through the desert to what he'd thought was climax a few times, only to find the long awaited end was just a mirage, dissolving into shimmering nothing as he approached. His brain and his body were at odds with each other: his brain was busy fantasizing about parts he clearly didn't have right now, and his body kept screaming that it needed attention for the actual nerve endings in attendance. He felt like the proverbial servant of two masters, and both masters were goddamn high maintenance bitches. If he paid too much attention to his physical parts, his brain started tipping towards dysphoria. If he paid too much attention to his brain, he lost his momentum towards climax. It was like he was trying to walk a balance beam, and he kept falling off to one side or the other. He was starting to get real tired of eating gym mat.

He stuck both hands into his hair and stared at the ceiling, frustrated beyond belief. This just wasn't working. He had to try something else. He had, he reminded himself, actually wanted this body, at least for a little while. Before the world's worst case of buyer's remorse had set in, he'd loved it.

Shutting his eyes again, he thought back to the Halloween party, the last time he'd felt the least bit sexy. And really, it hadn't been a case of least bit; he'd felt hella sexy, with his Marilyn Monroe curves and red lipstick and bedroom tumble of hair. I'd fuck me so hard, he thought to himself as he looked in the mirror.

And almost as soon as he exited the bathroom, he knew he wasn't the only one. He hit up the bar, and immediately a cowboy and a zoot-suited gangster began vying to get him a drink. "Boys, boys," he'd said, in his best His Girl Friday rat-a-tat. "No need to argue. A girl's got two hands. Why not get two drinks? I'll have a shot of whiskey from the buckaroo," he said to the cowboy, "and a vodka martini from the mister." He winked at the gangster. Each returned with a drink, and watched, mesmerized, as Tony professionally knocked back the whiskey and chased it with the martini. Why do men love a lady that can hold their liquor? Fuck, Tony liked them that way, too. He looked approvingly down the bar at Nat, dressed as the black swan, downing vodka like it was water. Her gaggle of drooling adherents seemed to grow with each shot; the dichotomy of primly-bunned ballerina and hard-drinking Soviet was irresistible.

"And now, gentlemen," he said, turning back to his own admirers, "if you'll excuse me, I have a date with the stage. Stick around, and you can see my number."

"Can I get your number?" The cowboy called after him as he walked away, but Tony just waggled his fingers over his shoulder: toodle-oo, fellas. He could feel their eyes on his rear end, and it was easy to put an extra sway in his lush new hips. He could practically hear jaws hit the floor. If only he could manage to get a pair of high heels…

He looked around for Steve as he made his way to the karaoke set-up, willing to jettison his performance number if he happened to bump into the ultimate target of his feminine wiles. Just the thought of Steve made him wet, and he was already plotting the seduction. A blowjob was definitely happening, preferably someplace wildly inappropriate (okay, mildly inappropriate, this was something Steve had to agree to), and after he'd slathered Steve's perfect dick in red lipstick and had him eating out of his hand, Tony would take him somewhere more private to eat out of something else…

Alone in his bedroom, Tony was gaining traction, his fingertips rubbing slow, steady circles against his clit. Borrowing one of his more vivid fantasies from Halloween, he imagined Steve's face in his lap, blonde beard rubbing against his inner thighs. If Tony really concentrated, he could feel the facial hair, surprisingly soft, against the tender skin. Tony slid his fingers down past his clitoris, spreading his labia apart. He slid his fingertips up and down his hot, wet slit, imagining Steve's tongue, also hot and wet, licking the same path. All it once, the picture changed, and it was the blunt head of Steve's cock instead, rubbing up and down. God, but Tony had actually loved that sensation, and the sensation of the head just as it had started to push in, before the pain had started.

The fill-me-up feeling was back full-force between Tony's legs, and suddenly he was dripping. Cautiously, he started to slide a finger inside, immediately knew it wasn't enough, and added a second, pressing in until the heel of his hand was against his clitoris. He thought about the weight and heat of Steve's body against him as he'd been pressed into the cushions of the sofa, the slightly sour smell of Steve's anxious sweat mixed with the unmistakable tang of vaginal fluid. This is pretty good, shit, he thought, as he began thrusting his fingers in and out. He might actually get somewhere. His hips began moving in counterpoint, adding in more grinding friction between the heel of his hand and his clitoris. His breath changed, moving almost entirely into his head and chest; it sounded like a woman panting in his ear while he fucked her. Only he was also the woman getting fucked. Suddenly, he felt like some kind of sexual Siamese twin, at once himself and this new, stupid hot vixen, both occupying the same geographical space. This was wild.

A picture flashed through his mind: Steve's drawing of femme fatale Tony, slinking her way across the newsprint in her black lingerie, her smile lit with dubious intent. And now Tony could see what she was slinking towards: there, waiting just outside the frame, was Steve Rogers, in a wool suit and a fedora, watching her and wanting her. What a pair. Maybe Steve could take her to some seedy little P.I. office somewhere and ravish her while she sprawled across his desk, one stiletto dangling from her stockinged foot. Tony could feel the spread of her hair across the desk, smell the typewriter ink. Steve, in just his shirt sleeves and suspenders, was standing between her legs, pinning open her white thighs with his .And now there was a shadow at the door: Were they going to get caught by Virginia Potts, Steve's long-suffering and underpaid secretary? Or was it possibly a man with a gun?

"Tony?" There were knuckles tapping on the bedroom door, quiet but insistent.

Tony's eyes popped open. No. God fucking dammit no. He was so close, he was almost there…

"Tony?" Pepper called again. "Tony? Are you awake?" Her voice was soft, but there was something in her tone that had him out of bed instantly, throwing on his robe. Something was wrong. When he opened the door, Pepper and Bruce were huddled together on the other side of it, also dressed in robes and pajamas. Their faces were drawn. Tony felt instantly .

"Here," Bruce said, extending his phone. "It's Nat. She has to talk to you."

Steve woke up in a hospital bed propped up almost to sitting. He had on a gown, one arm unsnapped, exposing his thickly bandaged left shoulder. It was dark, and the air was cold and very dry; stars and wisps of cloud drifted past the windows. A medical transport plane. Nat occupied the seat directly across from the bed. Her legs stretched across the narrow aisle, sock feet propped up on the edge of the mattress. She had the little reading light on above her head, spotlighting a thick paperback with Cyrillic lettering on the cover.

"What's that book?" he croaked experimentally. "Dostoevsky?"

"Stephen King," she said, laying it facedown over the arm of her seat. She smiled at him and pulled her feet off the bed. "How do you feel?"

"Like I got hit by a truck, and then the guy backed over me. And really, really thirsty."

She held over a big plastic cup for him, the kind with the bendy straw, until he'd had enough. "You can press the button on your IV for more pain meds," she said when he was through, showing him the remote with a single blue button.

"Will it put me out again?"

"What they've got you on? Definitely."

"In a minute, then. Where are we?"

She shrugged, "Over the Atlantic. We'll be home in about five hours. It's eleven o'clock now, which will put us in New York around seven at night. A helicopter is going to meet us at the airport. The med team says if you can walk off this plane on your own steam, it can take you home. Bruce is set up for you at the tower."

Steve raised one eyebrow: Really? Is that a good idea?

Nat nodded once in response, her eyes cutting towards the front of the plane where the med team was sitting at a slight remove.

"What if I can't?" he asked. "Then what?"

"Then the helicopter takes you to a secure medical facility. But, Steve," she said, meaningfully, "I think you would be much more comfortable at home."

"Okay. No pressure," he said, blowing out his cheeks.

"No," she agreed, smiling ironically. "No pressure. But I think the guy that can take a high velocity round and then stay upright on a snowmobile can probably walk across a tarmac."

"Do I have to say the Russian alphabet at the same time?"

"I'll give you a pass. More water?"

She held up the cup, and he drank again thirstily, but he could feel himself tiring. The pain, which had begun as background noise, was growing louder. Clammy sweat started clustering at his hairline.

"Nat," he said, moving his mouth from the straw, "how bad is it? I can't move my fingers."

She didn't answer, but reached over and punched the button for pain meds. "That was your last question," she informed him. "Like I said, high velocity round. It missed the artery, but it hit the bone. Anybody else's would have shattered like a teacup, but you're made of tough stuff, and the scapula only cracked. The bullet fragmented; they picked out most of the big pieces. You can't feel your fingers because of the nerve damage, but sensation and strength should come back. You'll be fine, Cap."

A potent combination of drugs and relief washed over him. The pain was suddenly much less; it was still floating in the water with him, but it was drifting peacefully to one side now instead of trying to knock him under. Sleep was starting to get insistent, but he held on for one more. "Tony?" he asked, his voice blurred at the edges.

Nat retrieved her book and propped her feet back up on the mattress. "I guess you can have a bonus question. I talked to him. He said it was good you weren't dying, because, if you were, he'd have to kill you. Now go to sleep, Rogers. There'll be a party for you at the tower when you wake up."

"Hey," Nat said, her lips beside his ear, "we're here."

Steve opened his eyes with difficulty. The plane was still dark, but the night sky outside was now cloudy, threatening rain.

"We're circling the airport; we're going to touch down in a few minutes," she said, her voice tight. Something was going on, something not quite right. "I'm going to help you get dressed."

"Thanks," he said, already tired after having been awake all of ten seconds. With his good arm, he pushed himself up all the way to sitting and swung his legs over the side of the bed. "Gah," he exclaimed; even that much movement hurt. And he was supposed to get dressed and walk across the tarmac? He'd need some more drugs.

Nat's lips were suddenly right next to his ear, whispering words only he could hear, "Steve, if you want to go home, that's the last sound you'll make. They can still change their minds and take you to medical, but they don't need to because you're an ultra-fast-healing super soldier. Bullet through the shoulder? That's a scratch. Got it?"

"Yes," he whispered, swallowing hard.

"Good. You need this?" she said, holding up a pink plastic bedpan.

"Yes," he said, taking it with a sigh. It wasn't the sort of help Steve wanted from Nat, but if she was the one offering, he figured he wasn't allowed to turn it down. She turned her back while he pissed, and then went and dumped the pan for him in the lav. When she came back, she had his clothes: boxers, khakis, a dark colored button-up, and loafers. One of the nurses, a canny looking young man in his late twenties, took out Steve's IV. Steve could feel the man's sharp brown eyes watching closely. Nat sensed his scrutiny, too, and she didn't like it.

"Excuse me," she said with a smile. "Could you give us some privacy please?" She held up the clothes, and the nurse moved away, back towards his seat closer to the front of the plane. "I don't like that one. He wasn't with the bird, joined the crew at the airport. " Nat mumbled as she worked to get Steve dressed from the waist down. But that was the easy part.

"Okay," she said, holding up the shirt, "bad arm first." She worked it on as gently as she could, but he still gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. Still, he didn't make a sound. The keen-eyed nurse came back with a shoulder harness and moved towards Steve as if to help put it on, but Nat smoothly intervened, intercepting him with another smile. "I've got it," she said, taking the immobilizer. The smile dropped as soon as the nurse had his back turned.

"You're sweating like a pig, Rogers," Nat muttered at him. "I'm glad you had a dark shirt."

"Are there pain pills?" he hissed in her ear as she wrangled his arm into the sling. Every jostle sent a jolt of pain all the way down his spine.

"No," she hissed back. "That was one of the conditions: Nurse Ratchett up there says you should be able to make it fine with what's already in your system. If not, they want you back on an IV with an accompanying nurse. You have to white knuckle it until we get there or they're gonna put you in the hospital or send you home with a chaperone."

He closed his eyes, trying to take this in. The pain was so bad, he sort of wanted to cry. "Nat," he whispered, "I'm not—"

"How's it gonna look if Tony doesn't come to see you at the hospital?"

That shut him up but good.

"Here," she said, louder and more pleasantly, "why don't you lie down while we land? Have some more water." She held the cup over for him, simultaneously conveying a do-not-fuck-this-up-you-moron threat with just a raised eyebrow. He drank, and tried to signal something like I'm-doing-my-best-what-more-do-you-want with just the lines on his forehead. He wasn't sure whether or not the message got through.

As the plane started to descend, Steve went involuntarily rigid, his body terrified of the pain that a bumpy landing might bring. He closed his eyes, trying to breath through his nose, not that it seemed to help.

"Hey," Nat said, sitting down next to him on the edge of the mattress, "pick one." Clearly she was trying to distract him.

"Good news. I'm a good news guy," he said tightly.

"You have to open your eyes, doofus."

He opened them to see Nat's two clenched fists extended towards him with the palms down. "Oh." He tapped the left one with his good hand. She flipped the selected fist and unrolled the fingers: a gold ring with an inlaid ruby lay in her palm.

"You want to try the other one?" she said, nodding towards her still closed right hand. He tapped it, but this one was empty. She looked at the empty palm as if genuinely puzzled. "Oh no, I just—oh. There it is." She reached behind his ear, and produced a second wedding band.

"Amazing," he said flatly.

"It is amazing. I had to fish them out of a pocket after they cut up your coat. You're lucky I thought about it." She slid both rings onto his right ring finger as they touched down. It felt like they'd landed on gravel, and he gripped her fingers, ill with pain.

Nat held his good arm as they deplaned, but it was more to torture him than to support him. Her walk was brisk and upright, and her grip on his arm commanded that his better be the same. He did his best, uncomfortably aware of the pricking gaze of the nurse as they marched across the tarmac towards the waiting helicopter. The rotors began firing before they reached it; it wasn't windy yet, but there was definitely a storm coming. The clouds were heavy with rain, and Steve knew the pilot probably didn't want to be out in it. Steve didn't want to be in it either; just thinking about the pitch and yaw of heavy weather flying made him hurt. Not that he didn't already. He put a heavy hand on Nat's shoulder as he clambered in; and if he grunted, he figured no one heard it over the sound of the rotors.

It was only a ten minute flight, but it might as well have been forever. The damn nurse watched him the entire time; Steve did his level best to look like he wasn't about to fall over. It's a scratch, he thought, like a mantra. It's a scratch. Nat kept pointing at things out the window—the Manhattan bridge, the Empire State building, Central Park—like she was a tour guide and he wasn't some guy just trying not to pass out. Still, he looked generally in the indicated direction and smiled tightly. There was nothing he could do about the sweat on his face other than to casually wipe it off when no one was looking, but the nurse was always looking.

When they reached the tower, Nat was out of her seat like a jack rabbit, pulling him up and out of the helicopter almost before they'd set down on the ground. The nurse was still collecting his bags as Nat hustled Steve across the helipad through the first sputter of fat raindrops. He stumbled along with her, leaning heavily against her shoulder, unable to walk fully upright, not at her pace. Bruce and Pepper met them at the door.

"Oh, no. Geez," Bruce said, his eyes going wide. "He's bleeding through his shirt—"

"Take him out of sight. Lock the door. Everybody disappears from the windows," Nat ordered. "There's a guy that can't come in here. We're going to leave him on the pad until he takes the hint."

There was a scramble, with people moving in all directions. Bruce dragged Steve to the master bedroom, muttering imprecations against Nat the entire time. A hospital bed stood in the center of the room, and Bruce tried to steer him into it, but in a last show of strength, Steve said firmly, "I'm sleeping in my own bed, Bruce."

"But—"

Steve pulled away and walked the last few steps himself. He lay down on his own mattress with a groan, collapsing heavily back into the pile of pillows. They had to give him this one; he'd earned it. Closing his eyes, he abandoned himself to the pain. Dimly, he felt Bruce press two fingers against his throat, and his evident pulse rate caused Bruce to make a sound of professional dismay.

"What's your pain level?" Bruce asked.

"High," Steve grunted. "Where's Tony?"

But Bruce ignored him, pushing up his sleeve, cleaning a place for a needle. Steve cracked open his eyes, looking around, but all he could see was Bruce fiddling with an IV stand, so he let the eyes shut again. The pain was unbelievable; it had him down on the mat, pummeling him.

"Hold on. I'm upping the dose," Bruce said, sliding a needle into the crook of Steve's elbow. "Just a minute. It's coming."

The drugs hit his system like a warm, welcome avalanche. He moaned as his body went limp, every cell in a state of ecstatic relief, so good it made him weepy. It might have been embarrassing if he still had the neurological capacity for something as complicated as an emotion. Assessing fingers pressed into his neck again, then withdrew.

"What's your pain level now?" Bruce asked. "Manageable?"

"S'gone. Pain's gone," Steve said, slurring the words. "Tony?" he tried again.

"When you wake up," Bruce assured him absently, hands already moving over Steve's shoulder, prodding gently. Steve wanted to argue or insist or something, but he couldn't. He just…couldn't. Sleep was pulling him down again into the deep water.