Work Text:
Current Influences
161 hours before.
Speedball wakes up on an inhale.
Even as his nightmare disintegrates, there’s still metal digging into the flesh of his back, and something wrapped around his ankle, tightening—what the hell?
Someone else's hand dives behind his back; he writhes up and away from it, and subsequently feels the source of his discomfort slide out from beneath his spine. A figure leans over him, filling the frame of his vision, and—oh.
Geoff the cameraman pulls a face at him, holding up the rescued connector at the end of the XLR cable demonstratively. The rest of it is still taut around Robbie’s leg.
“Really?” Geoff snickers, nodding at the equipment Robbie is nesting in.
Robbie doesn’t get up from the floor, just lifts his leg enough for the cord to be pulled loose.
“You didn’t have to drive all night,” he snarks back, dragging his hands over his face—Jesus, he fell asleep with his goggles on again. He’s going to have little rings around his eyes.
“You’re goddamn right about that. Union rules, baby.” Geoff sits back on his heels, wrapping up the cable into concentric loops that look more complicated than Robbie thinks they strictly need to be. Techies and their toys.
The bright afternoon light is suddenly blocked out; Robbie twists up and leans on one elbow. Microbes leans in, his round form framed by the van’s open rear doors. He looks between Robbie and Geoff.
“Hey,” he offers sheepishly.
“Hey,” Robbie returns, blinking. “I take it that strip mall robbery—?”
Microbe shakes his head. “Nada. False alarm.”
“Fffffffff,” Robbie releases the air in a long exhale that puffs out his upper lip, and collapses on his back again, staring at the carpeted ceiling of the New Warriors equipment van.
Yup. They’re really livin’ the dream.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
He wants to believe that at some point it really had been about helping people, that that satisfaction was its own reward.
But that was also wrapped up in the idea that if you put the time in, you’d eventually get noticed. If you did the work, you wouldn’t be a third-rate hero forever, right?
He didn’t make Avenger a few years back, and he probably never would now. It’s not like he’s getting any younger. None of them are.
He doesn’t know if it’s cooler or more pathetic that Captain America personally rejected him, Simon Cowell style.
Starting the TV show seemed like a good move; he’d called in a few favors with friends in the industry he’d grown up with, and the whole cast got great press for season one. He’d thought things were headed in the right direction.
But there’d been a drastic drop off in viewers after the season two premiere. MRVL network pulled their trailer and cut most of the crew, informing them that unless they stopped a ‘full-on cataclysm’ in the next four episodes, they’d likely be looking at a cancellation.
The most exciting thing that’s happened during their trip through the midwest was Namorita making out with some guy from Alpha Flight she ran into in a 7-11 parking lot.
Robbie wonders if this is a sign that they should throw in the towel. New heroes are emerging with ever weirder powers everyday. Maybe he’s just not cut out to be one of the greats.
But he remembers his mom got the biggest break of her acting career, landing a role on Secret Hospital, just before she was about to quit.
Robert Frost. Two roads in a wood… something something, less traveled?
Ugh, poetry is probably not what he needs in this situation.
“Speedball,” Microbe says with some urgency, and Robbie realizes his friend has been calling his name out for the last few seconds, trying to get to get his attention. Robbie cranes his neck up in response.
“What do you think we should do?” the big man asks, worry cascading over his face.
They’re in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where exactly nothing is happening. They should get a move on.
It’s less than two hours to New York, which will definitely have more going on. But that option feels a little like defeat. It’s essentially the global nexus of the superhero community. They aren’t going to dig their way out of obscurity by hiding in the Fantastic Four’s collective shadows.
They could call it quits right now.
Or… they could keep going. Take the 202 to the 287, blow past New York entirely and hang out in Boston for a few days. Maybe catch a few bad guys, get some cute photos of the team on the Freedom trail and at Fenway. Then track back further east, and end the season like they started it: bringing safety to everyday Americans. Robbie knows the perfect place.
He grew up in Springdale, a small town nestled in the larger city of Stamford. Even if the show got the axe by the time they got there, at least the whole team’d be together in a familiar place. Maybe his dad could barbecue for everyone. That wouldn’t be so bad.
Home is the place that… oh, what is it? Something about… they have to take you in, right? Who said that one? Doesn’t matter. That’s the basic idea he’s looking for.
They have to take you in.
“I’ve got an idea,” Robbie tells Microbe.
Obstacles
159 hours before.
How many times did it have to happen? How many times did history have to repeat itself?
He stares at the text on the chalkboard, disgusted.
It’s reprehensible.
It’s… It’s goddamn borderline discrimination at this point.
He is a regular here, and yet, always an outsider. Nothing will change that fact. His kind are thin on the ground in this place, and he knows it.
“Hey,” he shouts, his sandpaper-rough voice barely carrying above the steady din of the other patrons.
Her ponytail flips as she turns, and she takes two unhurried steps toward where he’s seated.
“How many years I been coming here, Mar?” he asks.
Marlena, the bartender, continues drying a pint glass with a bar rag, and shrugs.
“Would it kill you to have Molson on draught?” Logan slams a fist on the bartop, and the lines of his face crease into a withering stare. “Huh?”
Marlena raises an eyebrow, as if to indicate that yeah, it would. She smirks, shrugs again, and walks away.
Foundations
144 hours before.
Uatu watches.
Past Events
135 hours before.
“Hey, Andy. Whatcha got there?”
The huge gray featureless block pivots around on a tiny gray neck to regard Jen.
The longbox of comic issues the faceless Android holds against his chest blocks the psychic display around his neck he normally uses to communicate, but it doesn’t really matter. Jen’s begun to be able to read Awesome Andy’s slow, deliberate body language as well as the readout of his thoughts.
He nods at the comics.
“For a case?” she asks, walking further into the rows of comic book displays in the basement storeroom. Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg & Holliway has one of the most extensive comic book collections in the world, and since they are officially licensed by the heroes themselves and authorized by the Comics Code Authority, they are technically documents that can be used as precedence in a court of law.
Andy twists his massive noggin left to right once, then back. No.
Jen smiles. “Just some light reading, then?”
The gray blocky head bows once.
Not in her gamma-charged form, Jen has to stand on tiptoe to reach up and into the box. She pulls out the first issue whose pages her fingers brush.
“AVENGERS: KING-SIZED SPECIAL!” the cover reads. “The NEW AVENGERS vs. the OLD AVENGERS!”
In bright colors and bold strokes, two teams of superheroes face off against one another. T’Challa and Cap each raise a fist against Iron Man and Thor. Harsh snarls are drawn into all of their faces, as though they mean to rip one another apart. Even the Iron Man helmet looks angry.
Her mouth twists into a grimace when she sees the image of Clint preparing to loose one of his specialty arrows; the lineart’s not clear enough to for her to discern what kind. She’s not sure she’d know just by looking anyway.
“That one’s okay,” Stu, the archivist, tells her from his desk in the corner. “Scarlet Centurion’s outfit is... “ he chuckles. “It’s something. I mean, it’s not Nomad-level intense, but, it’s, you know… interesting. Did you ever see it in person?”
“Little bit before my time,” Jen sets the issue back into the box before turning to face him.
“Could’ve used more Doom,” Stu muses.
As if this stuff was just pulled from someone’s imagination. As if this hadn’t all actually happened.
Jen raises both eyebrows and purses her lips, sending him a silent really?
“I mean, you know, just from a narrative perspective,” he corrects quickly. “Sorry.”
Jen shakes her head. She had forgotten this could all be fun for some people.
She wonders if, after enough time, anyone portrayed in any of the books is still having fun.
Destiny
121 hours before.
“Hey there, Cap,” Sharon says into the comms.
“Hey,” Steve yawns in her ear.
She locks eyes with Agent Kaho, her second-in-command this mission, and holds up her index finger. He rolls his eyes, but waves her off, taking over direction of the seizure operation himself for the time being.
Sharon snakes around the exterior of the plane and away from the other agents, who are loading confiscated beakers and vials into airtight containers with various toxicity warnings, and then moving the containers into the cargo hold.
She steps under the wing, and half-sits, leaning against the landing gear. “What’s up?” She does a quick calculation. “Isn’t it… 3am back there? Shouldn’t you be asleep?”
“Tried. Woke up. Couldn’t fall back asleep,” he says, voice more laden with gravel than the makeshift runway she’s currently standing on. He sighs. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—I’ll call you later.”
Interrupting her only to apologize and try to drop off the call? So she’d essentially know something was wrong but have no idea what it was until she landed 14 hours from now? Classic Steve.
The public wouldn’t believe it, and she’d never state it on the record, but Captain America is—or at least, can be—a pretty terrible boyfriend. Or fuck buddy, or whatever it is they are right now.
S.H.I.E.L.D. definitely doesn’t know. Can’t know, officially—though she suspects there are certain rules that don’t entirely apply to Steve. He could probably make it—them—above board if he wanted. But he hasn’t brought it up, and neither has she. She doesn’t think, at this point, she will.
“Hey, no,” she returns before he can hang up. “I mean… I have a minute, anyway.” She could kick herself. Why does she do that? “Everything okay? Anything on fire?”
“No.” He’s going to put this on her? Make her drag it out of him? When he’s the one who called?
Fine.
“Any word on Bucky?”
“Not since London. He… He was good, Shar. The cube worked, and he was… He has to know that…everything wasn’t his fault, right?”
“Even if he knows that, he might not know it yet. Besides, still doesn’t make it easy. Is this actually about Bucky?”
Steve’s only reply is a grunt. She holds back a sigh. She doesn’t have the time or energy to tease this one out.
Sharon sees motion out of the corner of her eye. It’s Kaho, waving a clipboard at her.
“Well,” she pushes up from her seat on one of the tires and paces in a small oval. “We’ve got an entire A.I.M. lab to tear down. It’s gonna be four hours—” she looks over at Kaho, and tilts her head, scrunches her face in apology at him. He shakes his head but walks back to the loading area.
“—five hours,” she amends. “At least. And then the flight home. But, hey. I know what you can do in the meantime.”
On some level, she can’t believe she’s proposing this, but it’s honestly in everyone’s best interest.
“You should call Sally,” she suggests.
“Who? Sally?” he slurs, missing the quirk in her tone, their private joke apparently falling between the cracks in his sleep deprived thoughts.
“Sally Allbright, Harry,” she teases. “Who do you think I mean? You two can chat on the phone while you watch Casablanca.”
Sharon knows he gets the reference. They’ve watched the rom-com together before. More than once, actually. It felt like a good primer on modern relationships, back when they first started seeing one another.
But it dawned on her at some point that, in that particular story of unlikely best friends across the years, she is not either of the titular characters.
She knows he knows that, too.
Steve is quiet, voice tight when he finally responds.
“Sharon, that’s not funny—he’s not… That’s not very nice.”
He’s right: it really isn’t. Maybe, at some point in the past, it had been funny, but it was probably never nice.
He doesn’t offer up his reasons on why he thinks it isn’t nice; she is unsure if they would be the same as hers.
“Teasing aside,” she presses. “You should really call him.”
Sharon has… mixed feelings about Tony Stark. He’s not a bad guy, not by any means, but... he’s not the sort of person Sharon would choose to be friends with. He’s smooth and disingenuous when you first meet him, all smiles, all surface, and a shameless flirt.
She couldn’t quite process his and Steve’s dynamic. When she first started dating Steve, she wondered if he stayed friends with Stark out of some misguided sense of loyalty. Tony was one of the first people Steve met when he’d been thawed out, and maybe he thought he owed Stark for that.
And she was even more surprised they stayed close after Tony revealed he was Iron Man. Steve has never done well with secrets; he mostly saw them as a betrayal. But Steve took the news in stride. He seemed… happy about it, all things considered.
So there was more underneath, then. Tony—or Iron Man; both really—meant more to Steve than some abstract principle, some elusive standard of honesty. He wasn’t willing to give Stark up for that transgression.
But with Iron Man’s identity revealed, when she saw them together, it started to come together for her: the whole of their relationship, how it moved, how it worked.
They were grace and power incarnate when they fought alongside each other, each anticipating the other’s moves with absolute certainty and precision. And they were no less simpatico off the battlefield. It was like Stark opened up around Steve, bending toward him and trying to bloom: a flower seeking the sun.
They joked, they laughed, they touched… All the tension went out of Steve’s body around Tony, and he became lighter, easier, warmer, like he was thawing over and over again.
They would drift apart at times, but would always find their way back to one another, just like they had a few months ago, during the prison break. A crisis sprang up, and it ended with Steve and Tony reforming the Avengers.
Somehow, Steve and Sharon are a classic on-again off-again couple, but Steve and Tony are continuous in a way she can never compete with.
In fact, this might be the most out of sync Steve and Tony have ever been.
They haven’t been talking, not since Tony turned his brain into a computer. She doesn’t approve of Tony’s actions anymore than Steve does, and wouldn’t blame Steve if he needed a little space. But Sharon knows from experience it’s worse for everyone when the two of them get off track.
“He—” starts Steve, words clipping. “I can’t… He’s different,” he finishes, voice small.
“And you’re not?” Sharon challenges. “You’re the same as you’ve always been? You didn’t act any differently after Rebirth? That didn’t affect you at all?”
“Why,” Steve grumbles warmly, “do you always have to be so damn smart?”
“You like me smart,” she informs him. Smart is kind of a thing for Steve.
Why is she pushing? This is playing with fire. This is queuing up the film right before the big New Year’s Eve confession speech and hovering a finger over the play button on the remote.
Maybe it’s better if they figure it out. If it’s going to happen, maybe it should happen now.
“Yeah,” Steve concedes, “I do.” He clears his throat. “Well, I’ll let you go. Have a good flight home. Love you,” he tells her.
Sharon stops breathing. They haven’t said that to one another in… well, a very long time.
Her thoughts snarl up in knots of what brought that on and does he really mean that and why am I pushing him away, and before she can answer, he adds, “Dammit. Work comms. Sorry.”
Oh. She hadn’t even thought of that. Hill is going to have her ass. Ugh.
“Talk to you later,” she says, and ends the call.
Sharon puts a steadying hand on the exterior of the plane, and hooks her thumb on the other into the belt of her uniform harness. That was… unexpected. She’s not sure what to make of it.
To be fair, though, she’s been awake for nearly twenty hours, has beaten up more beekeepers than she can count, and if she ever sees a radioactive warning label again, it will be too soon.
This… is not a good time to consider the future of her relationship with a national icon.
She feels something in one of her tactical belt pouches, and, curious, retrieves it.
It’s a business card for the new staff psychologist; she’s seen him in the hall at the Administrative Affairs building a few times. He’s got a kind face.
The points of the card poke into her palm. She doesn’t remember picking it up, but she must have.
Steve said he loved her. Steve is a mess. She’s a mess. She’s not sure where this is going.
Maybe she shouldn’t be trying to work it out alone.
She puts the card back in her belt pouch, and goes to rejoin Kaho and the rest of the team.
She’ll give the doc a call when she gets back.
The Future
109 hours before.
They call him the Green Scar, and his life is the fight.
Miek the Unhived, Caiera and Hiroim of the Oldstrong, No-name of the Broodworld, Elloe, Mung, Korg: these are the names of his Warbound. They keep him alive, and he does as much for them.
(I have always thought of us as friends, Bruce, so I am truly, genuinely sorry.)
They are his nights and his days, the whole of his waking hours.
Only when he dreams does he remember what the humans said to him, their tinny little recorded voices squeaking out from the dashboard speakers.
How long had they been planning their betrayal?
(I believe in my heart that this may be the greatest opportunity of your life.)
He hopes now that they were right. That this will be his home, or his death. In either case, an end. A conclusion.
He hopes he never leaves this place, is not hurled across galaxies for a second time.
They don’t deserve his hope, but he offers it all the same, for their own sake.
Because if he ever sees the ones who did this to him again, the ones who dared call him ‘friend’... He will destroy them.
He will rend their bodies and raze their cities, all while reciting their own banal apologies back to them.
He will leave nothing of their planet behind save for scars that are his namesake and his legacy.
He is the Hulk, who some call the Sakaarson, and he hopes he never sees Earth again.
The Querent
98 hours before.
HUMAN GENOME PROJECT: FINAL CHROMOSOME PUBLISHED — General Electric+2.09% Stark Industries-0.32% Coca-Cola+0.62% — TENSIONS HIGH IN CONGRESS REGARDING INITIAL DRAFT OF SUPERHERO BILL — EARTHQUAKE RELIEF EFFORT CONTINUES IN JAVA — ENRON FOUNDER LAY FOUND GUILTY OF CONSPIRACY AND FRAUD —
^CINFO ABORT
The constant stream of information in his head goes dark with a blink, and Tony comes back to himself.
Water cascades over his bent head and neck before rushing down and spiralling around the drain, leeching away. It’s running clear now; the last of the excess black dye has been washed away. His palms are pressed flat against roughed mosaic stone tiles in front of him, arms tensed, holding him up.
His fingers are starting to go pruney. Last week, he would have tried to see if he could release the wrinkles with a only a thought. He leaves it alone for now.
He twists the chrome handle to the off position manually and grabs the towel hanging on the edge of the glass panel, stepping out the shower. He plunges his face into the loops of soft cotton, trying to lose himself in the feel of it as he paces to the vanity.
Finally, he pulls the towel away, and looks in the mirror.
“You again,” he says.
It’s not quite his face, but it’s not a stranger’s anymore, either. His damp, chemically-limp hair is jet again. The hastily peroxided yellowy tint has been covered over, erased. His beard hasn’t fully regrown yet; the dark stubble contours the already sharp lines of his cheeks and mimics the shade of the circles under his eyes, pulling additional focus to them.
He could probably make himself look healthier, less exhausted, instantaneously sprout a new goatee. Untangle the algorithm for growth, deploy the patch to his stem cells—it might not even require completely conscious thought.
But four months and five murders into his new life with Extremis, Tony has begun to recognize the importance of inefficiency. He’s trying to slow down, to make space for his own humanity.
Everything is going unspeakably fast without him overclocking his life, and he’s lost enough time as it is.
He wanted to save everyone. He thought he could. (Or maybe Extremis thought it could.)
He couldn’t even save himself.
Steve saw it happening. So did Fury. So did everyone else. Everyone but him.
But he can’t stop now. He has so, so far to go.
If this incident with Yinsen's son should tell him anything, it's that he's vulnerable, maybe more so than ever before. Since he destroyed the implant in his brain and rebooted himself, he's run all the existing tests and written a vast array of new ones. He thinks he can trust his own biology again... But then, it’s his own brain making that determination. How do you test the test suite? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, and all that.
It proves his point, and proves that he absolutely shouldn't be the one making it.
But there's no one else.
He is the only one with Extremis, the only one who has all the data.
But more than that, he’s the only one that can pay the cost.
It’s a difficult thing to measure, the cost of being a hero: it can be tracked in gray hairs, replacement hearts, sleepless nights, an empty bed. Small but dear rations of one’s soul, doled out over time, that will hopefully, in the end, be enough.
Sometimes the toll is greater, though, and comes due all at once.
Thor once explained to Tony, in the midst of a heart-to-heart years ago, how his father Odin had gouged out his own eye as payment to another god: the price to drink from the well of wisdom.
(Tony sympathizes; he knows about wanting more in the way of wisdom. And about drinking.)
And later, when Odin discovered that the Fate of all beings could be shaped by letters carving certain letters into the bark of the World Tree, he stabbed himself through with a spear, and hung himself from the Tree for nine days and nine nights. He had to be worthy enough to learn the way the runes worked. He traded his suffering for knowledge, and he endured.
Tony tosses his towel in the hamper, and thinks of what’s coming.
The cost, he suspects, is going to be more than a box of hair dye. It’s already high, and is going to get higher.
He pauses, leaning in the doorframe of his walk-in closet, and traces over every garment with his eyes before eschewing them all, and strides into his bedroom, naked for a moment before the golden undersuit flows over his skin.
A three-piece suit is going to be his armor of the day, but he’s avoiding it. He queries the time; he’s got a few minutes. He’s not meeting Peter at the jet until eleven thirty.
He sits on the edge his bed, and then leans back, lying all the way down and closing his eyes.
He’s not remotely piloting a suit, or giving a presentation at an event Hong Kong, or relaying threat coordinates to the team in the field. He’s here, fully present and accounted for, and he tells himself to enjoy it, because it’s going to be the last fragment of stillness he’s going to have for some time.
He’s booked solid for the next three days, occupied with what might be the most important fight of their lives. Not against some costumed villain, but the first draft of the SHRA.
He’s been invited to the hearings in DC, and he’s asked Peter to come along. Tony wonders how he’ll handle it. The proceedings are always a slow, frustrating grind, and sometimes draw to a halt altogether. It will probably make Peter want to crawl out of his skin. But it’s something he’ll have to learn to deal with. Not everything can be solved with webshooters and repulsor blasts.
He’s been taking Peter to every meeting, conference and business trip he can pencil in without it becoming entirely noticeable.
Parker is brilliant. He’s going to lead a multinational corporation one day, one way or another, and in the event that there’s a vacancy in the leadership at Stark, he should be able to step right in.
Yinsen’s son might have cost Tony his reputation, but that’s not the same thing as a legacy. If he can manage to keep that intact, well, he should at least have a plan in place.
He doesn’t know if it will come to that. He hopes it doesn’t. But he’s ready to give his life, too. He always has been. He’s been dead, or close to death, before. (Just over a week ago. Or, no, has it been two already? Christ.)
He lines up the collateral he’s gathered to secure them a future, and he hopes the universe won’t find it lacking.
There are few other things he can offer, and those have to be a last resort. They have to.
He thinks of Steve, suddenly, and something with jagged edges rakes across his heart.
They haven’t gotten a chance to talk in so long.
Later, he tells himself. One step at a time. When he gets back from D.C., when he understands the timeline better.
In the meantime, he still has a few tricks he can try.
He thinks of the call recipient he desires, and milliseconds later, the line in his head is dialling, connecting, ringing.
He’s not Kang or Doom, can’t actually manipulate time. But he is Tony Stark, and that still counts for something.
Maybe he can buy some.
A plasticy click, as though someone is picking up an honest-to-goodness landline receiver, and a deep accented voice answers. “Здравствуйте, Stark.”
“Boris!” Tony turns on the charm. “How’s my most favorite no-goodnik?”
“Is old joke, Tony,” Bullski’s voice cuts through the static. “Whatever you want, I charge you more for it now.”
“Fair enough,” Tony consents. “So, hey. Two questions: what’ve you got going on this week, and when’s the last time you were in Washington D.C.?”
Friends and Family
32 hours before.
Carol flops backward onto her bed, hair whipping out around her as she goes. The mattress bounces on impact; Chewie blinks at her and flicks his ears, annoyed, but not enough to move or extend his legs or otherwise stop being a loaf.
Stephen Strange....
Stephen Strange…?
Stephen Strange.
God. It’s so left field and random and magic is totally not her thing but he did that spell to pull them out of the dead dimension and she gave him that boost with her powers and then everything just clicked. It felt really good.
And he obviously felt it too and then he flirted with her after she made that stupid joke and—
It’s just so…
“...Strange?” she asks Chewie, flipping over to her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows. Chewie jumps off the bed, unimpressed.
She’s not sure why she’s never thought of it before. It’s not like he’s unattractive.
Is this what happens when you work together? When your powers mesh up just right, and you save the day? Do you always get this little high?
If it is, if you do… How is the entire rest of the team not sleeping together?
(Come to think of it… does she know that they’re not?)
Her hands ball into fists, and red sparks crackle in the air around them. New Relationship Energy is, in her case, apparently a literal thing. (She snorts at her own joke.)
Stephen, she thinks, giving it a try. Stephen. Steve?
No, her brain corrects instantly. There’s only one ‘Steve’ on the Avengers team lineup, and he is… well, in addition to not really being Carol’s type, he is off-limits in a number of different ways.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she pulls it out. For half a second she thinks it’s Steven already—he hasn’t been messing around with telepathy spells, has he?—but another glance shows that eyes in the profile photo are blue, not gray, and the smile is both brighter and sadder, if you know what to look for.
“Tony!” Carol answers, not bothering to tame her giddiness. “How are you?”
“Oh, you know,” he sighs. “Have you talked to Steve lately?”
“Steve Rogers?” she checks, probably unnecessarily.
“Yeah,” Tony says, thoughtful. “He left me a voicemail while I was in a hearing.”
“What did he say?”
“To call him back.”
“Tony,” Carol scolds.
“I know, I know, I just… I wondered if you knew how he was doing.”
“Why would I know—? God, are you two doing this thing again?”
“What?” Tony sounds genuinely confused. “What thing?”
“The thing where you avoid each other because you can’t talk about the fact that you—” Carol pinches the spot between her eyebrows and presses her lips together. “You know what? Never mind. Just call him, Tony.”
“As soon as I get a chance,” he says, sounding uneasy.
(Tony should have his ‘Top Ten Smartest People on the Planet’ membership temporarily revoked every time he acts like an idiot.)
“Did you actually want to talk to me about anything?” she drawls.
“Just wanted to say hi. How are you?” he asks, and he sounds interested, which worries her. She loves him, and there’s no question he’s absolutely one of the best people to spend time with in person, but he’s not usually a phone talker.
Maybe the hearings aren’t going as well as he’d like.
“You sounded… dare I say… giddy?” he prods.
“Well, I—” Carol begins, when she hears odd noises on the other end of the line. It sounds like… stomping?
She hears a young man’s voice talking to Tony. She can’t quite make out what he’s saying, and then he’s drowned out completely by metallic speech with a Russian accent.
“Tony? You okay? You need backup?”
“I’m fine. I... gotta go,” Tony tells her. Which she’s kinda figured out by now, with all the yelling in the background.
“You be good, Tony. Take care of… whatever that is, and then call Steve—”
Tony’s already hung up.
He wouldn’t try to take on anything he couldn’t handle, right?
Only twice on Sunday, she thinks, suppressing a shudder. She probably can’t make it to DC fast enough to be of any use.
She hopes Tony knows what he’s doing.
Hopes, Fears and Ideals
24 hours before.
Peter opens the door to his apartment.
MJ stands just inside the threshold, in a sort of 1950’s diner waitress pose: one hand on her hip, the other raised, holding a plate of mac and cheese. She beams at him.
“Welcome home, Mister Parker! C’mon in. How—”
By that time Peter has set down his suitcase, and taken the plate out of her hand. He gently sets it on the entryway table, and then, silently, wraps his arms around her and holds her close.
She probably thinks he’s been replaced with a clone or robot or something, being as quiet as he is.
But he’s here, and so is she, and she’s so soft and warm, and her hair smells both fruity and like flowers at the same time, and he just wants to curl up next to her and let the world fade away.
He could tell her he was almost made into a puddle on the steps of Lincoln Memorial today by Titanium Man.
He could tell her he thinks Tony isn’t being entirely honest with him, but he understands how stressed his boss is right now, how stressed everyone is right now. Plus, he knows what it’s like to have new powers you don’t fully understand yet.
He could tell her he loves her. (He will tell her that, in just a minute.)
But for now he just holds her, and says nothing at all.
They’re together.
It’ll be okay.
Outcome
12 hours after.
Steve stands in the aftermath, catching his breath.
They’ve been moving debris in silence for hours.
When the jet touched down, he steeled himself for what he might see. He told himself to treat it like a battle site. They’d have to approach it like any other humanitarian relief effort. They were there to serve the same immediate needs. People still needed to be rescued. Victims needed to be identified, and families needed to be reunited where they could.
But there’s a dark feeling settling over him, compressing his chest as he works. This is not the carnage of war, or the desolation left in the wake of a natural disaster.
This was an accident. Born of hubris, maybe, but it didn’t come from a vicious place. It was nothing more than a bad call.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
At some point, becoming a superhero became cheap. Plenty of powered people showing up, taking on mantles they don’t understand. Plenty of ‘super’ to go around, something of a dearth of ‘hero.’
Yes, the idea of ‘registration’ makes his skin crawl, tugs on threads of memory that lead him back to phrases like ‘War Relocation Authority’, and ‘Great Purge.’ The road to tyranny is always shorter than everyone seems to remember. This law they’re proposing is not an answer, not in and of itself.
But.
Steve stands in middle of the devastation, and watches his friends trying in vain to put the world right. The earth is charred for hundreds of yards in every direction. From where he is, he can’t even see the edge of the blast radius.
It’s not enough to say ‘these things happen.’ Not to these parents, these families.
Things do have to change; he knows that.
He just wants to be careful about what it is they change into.
Red and gold slices up into the sky, and Steve tracks it; Tony leads a team of fliers, airlifting survivors away from the rubble.
Something lights up inside Steve, just as it always has when he sees Tony take to the skies, but it feels less like the warm radiance of an ember now, and more like a cold machine glow.
You stopped your heart for me, Steve thinks.
Tony tried to talk to Steve not long after they landed, mentioning that they had a lead on Nitro, and Steve just snarled at him. Why did he do that?
Tony was just trying to be practical, find an actionable way forward, a path to get through the next few hours, the same as Steve.
He’ll apologize, as soon as he has the chance.
They want the same things. Don’t they?
Tony’s been in Washington, fighting the kind of battle Steve could never tolerate. Steve had heard from the others that it hadn’t gone as well as Tony hoped, and now, after this...
God, they have to talk. There’s so much Steve wants to say to him.
He wants to tell Tony about Bucky, about what happened in London. Tony’s read the reports, he’s sure, but there’s a difference between dry descriptions of incidents, and coffee and bagels just after sunrise.
He wants to say how scared he was of losing Tony to Extremis.
He wants to say, you stopped your heart for me, and it’s not the first time.
He taps his earpiece, and activates his private line to Tony.
“Yeah, Cap?” The signal comes straight from Tony’s mind now, he remembers, and it sound so clear, so… intimate, as if Tony is standing right beside him.
They can do this together.
“Tony, I—hang on.”
There’s a tap on his shoulder, and Steve expects to see the FEMA Chief when he turns.
But it’s a woman in a black and white S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform who he doesn’t recognize.
“Hill wants you on the Helicarrier, as soon as possible.”
Why isn’t Sharon the one telling him this? That’s… odd.
“We’re scheduled for a debrief tomorrow afternoon,” he explains.
“Not soon enough,” she says tersely.
What brought this on? They’re supposed to go to the memorial later, and then to the Baxter Building. He had been planning to arrive early, so he could finally see Tony alone.
Before Steve can protest, there’s a high-pitched whine, and the agent is grimacing and ripping her own comms piece from her ear. It makes a popping noise, and sparks in her hand.
She looks at the broken equipment nestled in her white-gloved palm with disdain. “I have to take care of this,” she says, then turns her scowl on him. “As soon as possible, Captain.”
She retreats back across the black ground to a waiting van, and something flies by in his periphery, closer than before.
“Tony,” he treads cautiously. “Was that you?”
“I’ve got your back, Cap,” Tony says in his ear, confirming his suspicion.
That’s… disconcerting.
They really have to talk.
“Tony—” he starts again.
“We’ve got survivors,” Scott pipes in on the main channel, and Steve spots his black-clad figure waving a few hundred feet away, near the remains of a building.
Tony flies past in their direction, as do Carol and Jan. Steve follows on foot.
They’ll sort this out, he tells himself. They have to.