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Chapter Text

“You’re going to tell us where to find Fury,” Ward commanded, cocking his gun and keeping it trained on Tony. “You’ve got until the count of five, and then I start shooting appendages.”

“You’re the ones who attacked him,” Steve said. “The wreck was all over the news. You killed him.”

“One,” Ward counted calmly.

“It’s the truth!” Steve insisted. “I saw the crash. That’s all I know.”

“Two.” Rumlow gripped the back of Tony’s head and shoved the tub into place. Tony let out a strangled sound.

“Wait!” Steve gasped. He made a small lunge against the restraints. “Please. You have to believe me. If I could tell you, I would.”

“Three.”

Rumlow plunged Tony’s head forward into the water.

“STOP!” Steve yelled. “Okay. Okay. I’ll tell you anything – please! Just let him up.”

Rumlow yanked Tony’s head backward, and he came up spluttering and gasping.

“It’s going to be okay, Tony,” Steve promised. “I’m going to tell them.” Tony shook his head violently, trying to shout something behind the tape that sounded suspiciously like, “shut up, you idiot,” but Steve pressed on. “I know where Fury is, and I can take you to him. But you’ve got to let Tony go first. Let him go, and I’ll take you right to the Director. You have my word.”

“Don’t fuck around, Rogers. Four,” Ward warned, and Rumlow’s hand twitched threateningly back toward the back of Tony’s head.

“Fine!” Steve snapped. “Please. I’ll tell you. Ward, I’ll tell you, because the message comes from Coulson.”

“Coulson’s dead,” Ward retorted.

“You and I both know that’s not true,” Steve said. “Because you betrayed him and your team.”

Ward snapped the gun toward Steve, and Steve moved.

Three Months Earlier

Steve was cinching the final strap that attached his duffel bag to his motorcycle when he finally looked up at Tony. Stark’s entrance into the garage had not been quiet, and Steve’s enhanced hearing could pick up anyone but Romanov from yards away. But Steve had felt his nerves lighting up in anticipation of meeting Tony’s eyes again, and he’d had to take a moment to tighten some things down before he could risk it.

Ever since Nick Fury had run him down in Times Square, Steve had felt locked up inside – like part of him had decided to go back into the ice when he realized there was almost no one left alive who knew what he looked like happy anyway. After days of crash courses in the Cold War, SHIELD filing systems, and something called a “phishing scheme,” Steve had fallen into a rhythm (run, study, punch, run, collapse) so numbingly repetitive that he could summon a smile or a smooth line without thinking about it. That had been the goal, as he was forcibly reminded every time he woke up screaming Bucky’s name or gasping for air as ice water filled his lungs: don’t think about it.

So that’s what he had been doing in Stuttgart – going through the Captain-America motions – when Tony Stark had dropped in and hijacked the mood, music blaring and mouth running as if he were on a one-man mission to demonstrate how out of place Steve was in this century. And that had thawed out something inside Steve all right: confusion, irritation, attraction, anger, regret, terror, and a heady relief he was aware must have been all over his face when Tony finally opened his eyes on the streets of New York. Watching Tony start breathing again was the closest Steve had felt to warm since his plane went down, and also the most exposed.

“Hitting the road then, Cap,” Tony said, in that way he had of turning a question into a statement. He ambled his way toward Steve, rolling the cuffs of his dress shirt up toward his elbows. “Lead singer going solo – that’s a tough break for the band right after our first big hit.”

“I’ve always pictured myself as more of a bass guitarist,” Steve replied evenly. Tony grinned.

“Was that a joke, Rogers? Well bless my stars and stripes and alert the National Guard. I think you’ll have to fight Thor for bass, though. Maybe Romanov too. We can hold auditions when you get back.” He paused, standing just a few feet away now, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. “You are coming back,” he finished, another question-as-statement.

“Whenever you need me,” Steve replied, then winced internally. Get a grip on yourself, Rogers. “I mean, right away if the team needs me. And soon either way. I just need a little bit of time to clear my head.”

There, he thought wryly, that sounded a little bit less like, “I didn’t ask to be woken up into this world, but you were the first person in it to make me feel something that wasn’t emptiness, and then you almost died, so I’m afraid that if I stuck around another day I would blurt out something extremely embarassing to the whole team, not to mention to the gorgeous woman you’re dating.”

“Well you’ll always have a room here,” Tony said. “The whole team will. Thor’s off planet for the moment, obviously, taking care of whatever King Lear situation’s going on back home. But Banner’s moving in this week, and I’m going to work on the spy kids. I could use a man of your talents in the Tower to protect me if Banner hulks out when we run out of tortilla chips – or if Romanov decides to stab me in the neck with another needle.”

“Another what?” Steve asked in alarm.

“Nothing. Just one of the many fun memories we’ll all laugh about together over the years.”

Tony must have misinterpreted the source of Steve’s furrowed brow, because as he plunged on, his voice sounded just a bit more strained.

“Now you’ll say I’m getting ahead of myself planning for years of inside jokes, but I’ve got a good feeling about our next album. And you know I called it right on Banner showing up for the giant, flying alien crawfish situation, so my track record’s not bad.”

“You’re right,” Steve said, and he thought he saw a bit of tension drain out of Tony’s shoulders. “You were right about Banner. And I was wrong about you.”

Tony stilled for a moment and then started bouncing faster.

“Bygones, Cap. The magical scepter of Norse mind tricks was in play. Loki was working us, just like you said. And you may have been right about some other things too: style over substance and all that. My reputation didn’t exactly spring out of my father’s head fully formed.”

“I was wrong about the wire,” Steve insisted. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he added, “but I’ll concede that you’re still a bit of an asshole if that helps maintain the image.”

Tony barked out a laugh, and Steve smiled.

“And you, Steve Rogers, might be even more of a smug little shit than I thought. But I have to say it’s growing on me.”

Tony paused, then pulled a sleek Stark Phone out of his pocket and held it out toward Steve.

“Just in case you need back-up for a gig,” he explained. He swiped one finger across the screen to reveal a shortcut to “Call Avengers,” which was accompanied by the exhausted selfie Tony had taken of the group at the shawarma joint. Thor was grinning and had one arm wrapped around a beleaguered Bruce. Clint was smirking and flipping off the camera while Natasha stole his fries. And Steve was smiling, not at the camera but at Tony – a softness in his eyes that he couldn’t believe Tony hadn’t already seen and interpreted.

“It’s too nice, Tony,” Steve said.

“It’s nothing,” Tony retorted easily. “I’ve got tons of these rattling around for when I need to reengineer something during a boring meeting. Plus I’m pretty sure I can write this off as a donation to an elderly veteran.” He paused to acknowledge Steve’s eye roll. “Just take it, Rogers. Use it to call home once in a while.”

Steve’s chest tightened, and he had to look down and grip the handlebars for a moment to ground himself. It wasn’t the phone really, though that was nice enough. When Steve grew up, there hadn’t even been enough money or copper wiring for their building to put in a party line. But more than that it was the warmth he could see in his own eyes in the photograph – the promise that he could call home and someone would answer.

Tony was probably telling the truth when he said it was nothing to him. He couldn’t know what it meant to Steve to hear that word offered to him so casually. Tony was generous. He was asking a group of practical strangers to move in with him: maybe it really was easy to give a lot when you had so much to give.

Or maybe, Steve thought, as he looked up and met Tony’s eyes again, Tony had guessed more than he was saying about why Steve was leaving. Maybe he was trying to throw Steve a line he could follow to find his way back.

Steve took the phone, his fingers brushing slightly against Tony’s as he did. Even that small contact sent pins and needles up his arm, and the question of whether to risk a hug was decided on the spot.

“Thank you,” he said, swinging his leg over the bike and starting the engine before he could lose the will to go. “Try not to pick too many fights without me.”

“Wouldn’t be the same, Cap,” Tony grinned.

“You know what you look like with that goofy smile on your face.”

Tony’s eyes snapped up from his phone, where Rhodey had caught him checking the Avengers group chat yet again.

It was a rare night with just the two of them at the Tower. Steve was in his fifth week on the road, Clint and Natasha were off on a SHIELD mission, and Thor had brought Bruce out to New Mexico to meet Jane and consult on her new project. Rhodey had come by to check out some upgrades Tony was making to the War Machine armor and had stayed for a beer in what had informally become the team common room.

“That smile was not goofy,” Tony countered. “It was mocking – it was a show of richly deserved derision. You should see how Captain America is representing the Avengers to the heartland. It’s a sartorial disgrace.”

Steve had been sending them periodic photos from his trip through modern America. They ran the gambit from bemused wonder (a shot of thirty different brands and varieties of toothpaste) to righteous outrage (a close-up on the price of a baseball ticket, submitted without comment), but to Tony’s delight, they were all deeply, constitutionally dorky.

Tony held out the most recent example for Rhodey’s inspection. Steve was wearing a blue checked shirt tucked into khakis and posing with a grocery-store employee who had apparently helped him find a new flavor of Pop Tarts to try for Thor. The grocery worker – a scrawny teenage boy with a mop of black hair – looked like he was going to cry or possibly throw up after being so close to Captain America. And who could blame him, really, because Steve was giving one of his softest lopsided smiles – one eyebrow quirked as if in apology for how impossibly photogenic he was.

But that wasn’t the important thing, Tony reminded himself. The important thing was:

“Dockers, Rhodey,” he explained. “The man is wearing Dockers.”

Rhodey let out a sigh and looked Tony steadily in the eye.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing here, man?” he asked gently. “I know you and Pepper have been having a rough time since New York. And don’t think I haven’t noticed how much less you’re sleeping either. Are you sure this –” he gestured at the phone, “is healthy right now?”

“Rhodey, I am offended. Are you implying that I am developing a crush on Captain America as a coping mechanism?”

“Gee, Tony, I wonder what in your recent history would make me think you would avoid dealing with the knowledge of your own mortality by finding someone inappropriate to flirt with. On a totally separate note, doesn’t Natalie Rushman live here now?”

“She and Pepper have a standing lunch date, actually.”

“I don’t think that’s really helping your case, Tony. Natasha’s probably seeing Pepper more regularly than you are.”

That wasn’t quite true, but it was closer to true than Tony cared to admit. He had been sleeping horribly since his brief trip to space (when he slept at all), and he’d been finding excuses to keep Pepper out of the Tower so she wouldn’t find out how bad the caffeine shakes had gotten. It was a stalling tactic, he knew – a game he was trying to prolong without any sense of how to win it. But then again, Tony had produced a lot of his best work in states of total desperation.

“Look, I know you’re excited about Avenging, and I’m excited for you,” Rhodey continued. “I just hope you know what you really want from people right now.” He drained the last of his beer. “And for the record, I wasn’t implying that you were developing a crush on Captain America. I saw your teenage bedroom, and I think we both know that ship sailed a long time ago.”

“That is a flagrant violation of the treaty protecting adolescent activities,” Tony protested. “According to the Geneva Convention, I am required to inform you that all references to my freshman dorm room – or to any matters concerning my physical appearance at age fifteen – will be considered an act of war, and thus open to retaliation. I have photo evidence of your attempt to grow a mustache junior year, and I am not afraid to send it to the Joint Chiefs.”

“I’m sorry, did you say that was ‘retaliation’ or ‘deflection’?” Rhodey retorted, and Tony had to concede (privately, of course) that that was probably game point to Rhodey.

But losing this round didn’t mean Tony was going to stop deflecting. He was certainly not, for example, going to reflect on why he had saved all of the photos from Steve’s road trip onto his backup drives – or to examine whether his motivations for doing so might perhaps go deeper than his stated aim: to make a slide presentation, entitled “Why Cap Needs a Personal Shopper,” to be shown at the next Avengers meeting. He knew better to pull on that particular thread. Pepper had told him he was reckless with his safety, but even Tony understood that if brushing against the doorknob burns your fingers, you leave that door firmly closed – because chances are everything on the other side is on fire.

“Fine. I’ll tell my therapist to set aside some time to unpack my memorabilia fetish, Sugar Bear,” Tony promised with faux seriousness, “but honestly it’s probably going to be some time before we get to it, what with all the genocidal aliens and nuclear warheads floating around in there. Not to mention a whole lot of other sexually confusing experiences I had in the dorm room in question –”

“Tony,” Rhodey cut him off, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I love you. And if you would actually talk to a therapist about anything – literally anything at all – I would buy you every Captain America poster, action figure, and lunch box ever made.”

“Kinky,” Tony joked. And then, because he knew Rhodey had been very worried about him ever since his meltdown two weeks ago (when he’d run out of a date with Pepper and called his armor from an alleyway because someone was letting their cell phone ring unanswered, and suddenly he was blasting toward a hole in the sky, air thinning and light fading, and he was going to die up there, and no one would hear him screaming), he dropped the shields for a moment.

“I’m working on it, Rhodey. I am. I know it’s all a bit of a mess right now, but I think – I think the team could be good. For each other. For me.”

And, shockingly, Tony meant it. Because after the incident at the restaurant, Steve had started to add silly doodles of the team to the group text. Bruce had dragged Tony up to the kitchen to ask for his help on a research problem while feeding him curry. Thor had begun demonstrating a cluelessness about how to work the television that Tony suspected was a ruse to rope him into watching – and explaining the differential merits of – various series of Star Trek. And when Clint and Natasha came back from SHIELD headquarters at 2:30 AM to find Tony nursing a glass of scotch on the couch with all the lights on, they had pulled out a six-pack of beers and started casually swapping stories about things that had made them freeze up during missions.

It was as much of a surprise to Tony as anyone else, but he found he could accept help more easily from this weird team of people who were making a mess of his kitchen and using his ten-thousand-dollar dining table for beer pong than he could from the woman he had loved for years, who was already exhausting herself trying to take care of his chaotic professional habits without having to clean up his personal messes as well. He suspected that Pepper sensed this – that she had probably been the one to tell the Avengers about Tony’s episode in the first place. He knew they needed to talk about what it meant. But Tony hadn’t been brave enough to start that conversation when he knew too well how it was likely to end.

“I’m working on it,” he repeated.

Rhodey watched him steadily for a while and then nodded. He opened his mouth to say more, but he was cut off by the sound of Tony’s phone ringing. Tony looked down at it, and he could feel himself smiling again (goofily…okay, it was a goofy smile), because a photo of Steve grinning in front of the World’s Biggest Ball of Yarn had just appeared on his screen. Rhodey’s forehead creased slightly as he took in Tony’s reaction, but he pulled Tony into a hug as he got up.

“I have to get home anyway. Go ahead and take it. Just…be careful, Tony.”

Careful is my middle name, Tony thought to himself wryly as he watched Rhodey leave, swiping right to answer the call and settling into his chair again.

“O Captain, my Captain, to what do I owe pleasure?”

“I’m afraid it’s more business then pleasure,” Steve apologized, and Tony jumped back to his feet immediately.

“Are you okay? What’s going on?”

“I’m fine,” Steve assured him quickly. “But I just got a visit from a mutual friend.”

Tony let out a small breath.

“Of the eye-patch-wearing, trench-coat-swirling variety?”

“The very same. If you turn on the TV, you’ll see why.”

“JARVIS,” Tony prompted, and the flatscreen flickered to life, revealing footage of a smoldering office building in what looked like Washington D.C. Most of the action seemed to be over, but the lights of ambulances flahsed through the plaza. Tony scanned the foreground of the shot, and sure enough –

“Shit,” he swore, trying not to count the prone forms in the bottom of the frame.

“ – only the first of many losses, if the files from Project TAHITI are not delivered to me,” a low voice was saying, and the visual suddenly shifted to a bearded man dressed in a robe, who was silhouetted against a dark background. “The Mandarin does not give warnings. He makes promises. Director Fury, you have one week.”

The image disappeared, quickly replaced by a commercial for paper towels that was midway through its jingle. The terrorist must have hijacked the feed – that meant this was no backyard shed operation. Tony was already compiling a list of words to have JARVIS run through SHIELD and CIA databases, and he was just about to pull up a broadcast-satellite map when he realized Steve was talking again.

“Apparently SHIELD had gotten an earlier tip about this guy from an agent who’s now gone missing,” Steve was saying. “They think the agent might have intel that could help prevent the next attack. I can’t say too much more over the phone, but I asked the Director if I could bring in the team.”

Steve paused for a moment, and Tony realized he had started drumming nervously on the back of the chair he had vacated, trying to wait to call the armor until Steve actually asked him to come.

“I think I might need the band for this gig after all. You feel like putting on the suit?”

“Just don’t start warming up without me.”

Chapter Text

Tony arrived at the Triskelion just after Clint and Natasha, who were debriefing with Steve outside the conference room. Natasha was still dressed in an evening gown, and Clint was sporting an impressive black eye, so they must have been pulled off their previous mission abruptly. Steve had changed from road-trip casual into a generic SHIELD tac suit that had absolutely no hope of making him look inconspicuous. Tony was just making a mental note to send Fury thank-you flowers for the particularly clingy cut of those pants when Steve looked over at him with a smile that was warm and shy, and – shit. He had to admit that Rhodey may have had the tiniest, most infinitesimal point, because Tony’s heart rate really should not be more responsive to a little smile than it was to super-soldier physique.

“Stark,” Steve greeted him.

“Cap, Wonder Twins,” Tony replied. “Barton, glad to see the minor villains of the world find your face as punchable as we do.”

“Bite me,” Clint grinned, clapping a hand on Tony’s shoulder. “And nice hairdo, by the way. It really screams ‘I blacked out in my workshop again and slept in a puddle of motor oil.’” Steve’s face pinched tight as he scanned Tony’s face, but Natasha just rolled her eyes.

“Does anyone else need to disguise their concern for each other with mockery, or can we get this briefing over with?” she asked. “I’ve been in this dress for almost twenty-four hours, and if I don’t get something fried to eat soon I’m going to impale the next person I see with these heels.”

“We’re just in time, I see,” Bruce’s voice commented wryly. He and Thor had appeared at the end of the hallway; and apparently they had seen the GIF of Liz Lemon flipping a table that Natasha had added to the group text, because Bruce had a bag of fast food in his hands. He reached into it and retrieved a box of onion rings for Natasha, who let out a noise of appreciation that made Bruce blush slightly.

“This is why Bruce is my favorite,” she announced.

“I didn’t know we were already picking favorites,” Tony complained, reaching out to grab an onion ring only to have Natasha slap his hand away with lightning speed.

“Don’t worry, we all know you already called Steve,” she smiled sweetly at him. Tony resolutely did not turn to see Steve’s reaction to that, pretending to be absorbed in his quest for snacks instead.

“That’s because Cap doesn’t get slappy when he’s hangry, Romanov. Now fork over the goods.”

“Should we battle for them?” Thor asked excitedly.

“No,” Steve said firmly, at the same time that Clint exclaimed “arm wrestling,” and Tony answered “square roots.”

Bruce sighed and pulled another box of onion rings out of the bag. Tony took it and stuck his tongue out at Natasha, who flipped him off without a change of expression. Steve cleared his throat, struggling not to smile.

“Maybe we can postpone the competitive math until after the briefing?” he suggested, and without waiting for a response, he opened the door and led the way into the conference room.

Fury was standing at the head of the table, flanked by two women Tony had never seen before. The younger of the two was busily at work on a laptop, but she looked up and let out a small “Oh my God” when she saw them enter. The other woman had more of the dress and demeanor of a SHIELD agent. As she turned to face them, her crossed arms and impassive expression made Tony suddenly think about the thin metal lids that sealed the containers of nitroglycerin in his workshop.

“Barton, Romanov,” nitroglycerin greeted them with the barest of nods.

“May.” Clint’s voice registered a momentary shock, and then Tony watched his face go eerily blank, like someone had shut a door behind his eyes. Tony glanced sideways at Steve, who seemed just as confused as he was by Clint’s reaction. But Natasha must have anticipated it, because she moved smoothly in front of him, trailing one hand lightly down Clint’s arm as she shifted positions. She returned May’s nod, which Tony could only imagine was some spy version of game recognizing game.

“I didn’t know you were back in the field,” Natasha said.

“There was some arm twisting involved,” May replied dryly.

“Agent May is part of a special task force designing the op for this mission,” Fury explained. “This is –”

“I’m Skye!” the younger woman said brightly, shooting up from her spot at the table. “I’m the hacker. SHIELD consultant. Field agent. Well soon I’ll be a field agent.” She shot a look at May, who raised one eyebrow almost imperceptibly. “Probably soon. And I know who you are, obviously. Legends.”

“Probably-soon-but-definitely-not-yet-Agent Skye has been tracing broadcast signals to help us get a lock on possible locations for the Mandarin’s hideouts,” Fury cut in. A personnel file was suddenly projected over the table, accompanied by the photo of a young man with curly brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses. “Agent Harrison was on assignment monitoring the Mandarin’s network, but he went missing shortly after his first report, and we suspect that he may have been taken for interrogation. We need to extract him, and Skye has been identifying our targets.”

Skye turned her attention back to her laptop, fingers flying over the keys to bring up a series of additional images on the holo projector in the middle of the table. The team took seats on either side as she began her explanation.

“Whoever is running the Mandarin broadcasts, they’ve been using a new spread spectrum to hide their transmission locations. But I created a program that generates random frequency-hopping patterns and tests them against the spectrum. When I got my matches, I used them to make this.” Skye gestured to a world map, which had about a dozen blue dots in various countries. “Now some of these are almost definitely dummy signals, so I cross-checked each location against local chatter – police scanners, package deliveries, anything that might indicate a bunch of shady characters had moved into town. That left me here.” She clicked, and all but five of the blue dots disappeared.

Tony slid a business card across the table to her.

“If these guys are too stupid to snap you up, I’d love to give you a crack at some real tech,” he told her with a wink. “I’ve got a decryption program that makes SHIELD cyber security look like a baby gate.”

“No poaching, Stark,” Fury growled.

Tony noticed that Steve had to hide a small smile behind his hand and added a mental hash mark to the “Iron Man vs. Director That’s-Classified” tally that he kept running in his head during briefings.

“We’ve had agents casing all five possible locations,” the Director continued, “and we’ve determined that these two are the most likely for hostage holding.”

Two images enlarged on the holo table: what looked like an abandoned warehouse labeled “New Brunswick, New Jersey” and a mid-rise office building labeled “Toronto, Ontario.”

“We need to hit both facilities simultaneously so the terrorists don’t have time to go to ground,” Fury explained. “So the plan is to split into two teams. Captain Rogers, you’ll take Iron Man, along with Agents May, Barton, and Rumlow, and execute a tactical strike in Jersey. Agent Romanov, you’ll take Thor and Dr. Banner, along with Agent Ward, and infiltrate the office in Toronto. That location seems to be more heavily guarded, so Romanov and Ward will go in under cover, with the big guns standing in reserve.”

“Point of order,” Tony interrupted, “when did we decide that Thor and Banner are the big guns? I would like the record to reflect that I dispute that designation, and that I will be filing an appeal, on the grounds that I am the only Avenger who carries literal big guns.”

“I knew you would say that, Stark,” Thor replied, “which is why I have asked Banner to design a great contest of warrior prowess, at which I will officially earn my title as strongest Avenger.”

“I already told you I’m not doing that,” Bruce said, at the same time that Tony fired back, “We’ll see about that, Point Break.”

Fury shot May a look that seemed to say, “you see what I put up with?”

“Any real questions?” he asked them.

“Yeah, I’ve got one,” Tony said casually, using his phone to bring up a projection of his own. “What’s Project TAHITI?”

The reactions were subtle, and Tony might have missed them if he hadn’t been looking. Skye’s eyes flickered to the image of redacted files Tony’s phone was displaying, and she skimmed nervously over the visible words before returning her gaze to Fury. May barely moved a muscle, but the corners of her mouth tightened ever so slightly, from cool to grim. Fury turned to face Tony, one hand slipping just slightly toward the holster on his hip. Steve must have seen that last movement too, because he shifted the angle of his chair, putting himself more firmly between Fury and Tony.

“That’s classified,” Fury said stonily.

“Oh trust me, I know the drill,” Tony agreed, “which is why I did a little preliminary research to get us started. You’ve buried this one very, very deep, so I couldn’t get much.” He tapped a few buttons on his phone, and an image of a medical facility appeared next to the blacked-out files. The examination chair in the middle was empty, but it was surrounded by monitoring equipment, IV tubes, a ventilator, and what looked like an injection gun. “It seems like SHIELD has gotten back into the human experimentation game.”

Natasha’s eyes narrowed, and Steve’s shoulders went rigid.

“Please tell me that’s not what it looks like,” Bruce said. His voice deceptively quiet, but Tony noticed a tinge of green around his neck. Natasha reached out to cover his clenched hands with one of hers.

“It’s not what it looks like,” Fury replied calmly. “SHIELD isn’t anywhere near the serum, Doctor. And this is why these files are classified, Stark. So people won’t see something they don’t understand and start a panic.”

“Help us understand it, then,” Steve retorted. His shoulders hadn’t relaxed in the slightest, and his jaw was clenched as he leaned forward across the table toward Fury. “You want us on the mission, so tell us what we’re helping you protect.”

“Project TAHITI is no longer in operation,” Fury said firmly. “There’s no chance of it being revived unless it falls into enemy hands. I don’t know how the Mandarin found out about it, and I don’t have to tell you how cranky that makes me. So until I know where my leak is, Project TAHITI gets more dangerous the more people who know about it. You can accept the need-to-know, or you can leave an agent with sensitive intel in the hands of terrorists. Those are the only terms I can offer, Captain.”

Tony was practically vibrating with smart-ass responses, but just as he was preparing to fire one off, Steve looked over at him. Weeks ago, Tony might have expected Steve to give him a warning glare, but now Steve’s eyes were searching, as if he were trying to gather Tony’s opinion from his expression. And that made Tony’s chest feel suddenly tight and warm in a way that made Fury’s secrecy fetish fade into a minor irritation.

“We’ll talk it over,” Tony said, and he let the jibes and nicknames drop, because the words weren’t meant for Fury. Steve nodded, his jaw loosening slightly.    

“My team has the mission specs if you decide to join us,” May acknowledged. She inclined her head slightly toward Skye, who started packing up her equipment. “The bus leaves at 1800.”

Fury gave them all one final stern look before striding out of the room, May and Skye following in his wake. Skye hesitated slightly at the door, opened her mouth, and then shut it again, apparently changing her mind. She gave them a small wave and disappeared.

“So what cat has got your normally unstoppable tongue, Barton?” Tony asked Clint as soon as the team was alone. Clint glared at him for a moment, looking as if he were considering a flat denial, but then he sighed, his shoulders sagging.

“May worked ops with Coulson for years when she was in the field,” he explained. “They were very close. I haven’t seen her since –“ His voice tightened and he glanced up at the ceiling. “I didn’t expect to see her.”

“Do you trust her?” Steve asked, and Tony was sure he could hear other questions lurking behind that one. Tony wondered if they included, “just how close were you to Coulson?”

Clint and Natasha shared one of their looks – the kind that made it seem like they were speaking Morse code with their pupils.

“I’ve trusted May with my life on missions, and I’d do it again,” Natasha said finally. “But she was done after Bahrain. If she’s back in the field now, it’s not for SHIELD, and it’s not for Nick Fury. There’s another angle here, and I don’t like that I can’t see it.”

Steve nodded. “I don’t like splitting up either, especially when the person running the op is withholding information,” he admitted. “But if there’s a chance that we can save a life and stop another attack, I don’t see how we can walk away.” He looked around the table to invite the others to chime in, his eyes lingering when he met Tony’s gaze.

“Then let’s bust this guy out, Cap,” Tony declared. “And afterward, we can find out what Fury’s keeping from us this time.”

“Status check,” Steve called.

“In position on the roof,” Clint replied. “Ready to cover Rumlow’s entrance on the ground.”

“In position by the northeast corner, standing ready for evac,” May responded.

“In position right next to you, probably doing lasting damage to my knees trying to crouch this long,” Tony stage-whispered, “ready to launch your star-spangled ass through a window because you think ‘tactical strike’ rhymes with ‘human projectile.’”

Steve glanced over at Tony to make his eye roll as visible as possible, but he was smiling in a way that probably ruined the effect.

Whatever hopes he’d had that weeks on the road would help him maintain more friendly, professional feelings toward his teammate had gone out the window the second he saw him again at the Triskelion. His only chance of salvaging things now was to try to keep it together well enough that Tony wouldn’t notice Steve leaning toward him all the time like the world’s saddest sunflower.

“Do we have a location?” Steve asked over the comms.

“The dwarves are reading some promising heat signatures on the third floor, northwest corner,” came a voice that May had introduced as Leopold Fitz.

“Judging by the bioscans, Agent Harrison seems to be alive, though in some distress,” a second new voice – Jemma Simmons – followed up.

“All right, Rumlow and I will enter the building on my mark,” Steve said.

Steve and Tony straightened carefully, and Steve stepped into position on Iron Man’s foot as Tony’s arm wrapped around his waist.

“Be careful,” Steve said quietly.

“I’m in a suit of armor,” Tony pointed out, “and you’re the one who asked to be thrown through glass into a room full of armed terrorists.”

“You’ve got my back,” Steve responded calmly. Tony paused, studying Steve’s face, and Steve mentally kicked himself for how quickly Project: Don’t Be So Obvious, Rogers was getting off track. But Tony just tightened the arm around his waist.

“You better believe it.”

They blasted off quickly, as they knew that once the armor was in the air the element of surprise wouldn’t last long.

“Now!” Steve yelled, and he tucked into position as Tony let him drop.

He was rolling already by the time he hit the glass. He landed in a crouch, grabbed the shield from his back and held it in front of him as he quickly scanned the room. A young man Steve assumed was Harrison was lying in a medical chair near the center, and three guards with assault rifles and masks had been scattered around the room. One of the three had managed to get his gun pointed in Steve’s direction, so Steve aimed the shield in his direction first. As soon as it was in the air, he charged the man closest to him. He collided in time to rip the assault rifle upward, then spun the guard’s body to put it between him and the final assailant. He twisted the rifle out of guard number two’s hand and shot guard number three, just as a bullet from guard number three hit guard number two in the chest.

“Room is clear,” he announced over the comms, already moving to retrieve his shield.

“I’ve got company on the first floor,” Rumlow put in.

“Iron Man?” Steve called.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Tony replied. The sound of shooting from below intensified as Tony rocketed past the building, firing through windows as he went. If everything went well, he’d be able to provide enough of a distraction for Rumlow to grab any available intel and for Steve to grab Harrison.

Steve got busy with his part of the plan, moving forward to see how much help the agent would need getting out. Steve’s stomach lurched as he noticed how young Harrison really was. He was bruised, but only a little bloodied – one stream flowing down from his nose and onto his neck.

“Agent Harrison,” Steve said, laying one hand gently on the man’s shoulder. “My name is Steve Rogers, and I’m here to get you home. Do you think you can walk?”

Harrison’s eyes struggled to focus on him, and Steve swore quietly to himself as he heard the sounds of more gunmen approaching down the hall.

“You’re…Captain America,” Harrison managed blearily.

“Yes,” Steve agreed. “And I’m very sorry to do this, but we need to get moving.” He pulled out the injector gun that May had given him, and held it over Harrison’s chest. “This is adrenaline. It’s not going to feel great. But I promise I won’t leave you.”

Harrison nodded slightly, and Steve pulled the trigger as smoothly as he could. Harrison gasped, his eyes going wide as the chemicals hit him. The men were almost at the door now, so Steve couldn’t offer Harrison much time to recover before he pressed the rifle into his hand and pulled him to his feet.

“Stay behind me. We’re headed for evac across the building.”

The door burst open, and it was time to go. Steve kept the shield in front of him as he surged forward, waiting to start throwing it until they had cleared the door and he could keep his body more closely in front of Harrison’s. The SHIELD agent grasped the strategy quickly and stayed tight to Steve’s back, picking off gunmen over his shoulder.

Shortly after their last opponent hit the ground, Harrison grabbed Steve’s arm.

“Turn off your comms,” he said urgently.

“What?”

“I have to tell you something, but I can’t – turn off your comms.”

A split second later, Steve felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and he looked over in time to see the flash of a laser tracker. He dragged Harrison behind a pillar, and a shower of debris erupted as a bullet grazed the edge of the concrete.

“Stay back,” Steve barked, and then he was ricocheting his shield off the walls again, spinning out in pursuit of their new attackers. There were only three of them, and after a few well-aimed throws the coast was clear to the northwest corner.

“I’ve got Harrison and a path to the exit,” he told the team. “Hawkeye, can I get a hand?”

“On it, Cap,” Clint confirmed, and Steve heard a faint whizzing noise as the archer shot an arrow that carried their zipline into position near the evac point. Steve beckoned to Harrison as he took the metal handle out of his utility belt. They got to the window just in time to see Tony shoot around the building, positioning himself to cover their exit. An explosion rocked the building from below, and Rumlow came hurtling out of a first-floor window, clutching a case under his left arm.

“That’s our cue,” Steve said, fastening the handle over the line and reaching out to Harrison. “Ready? Hold on tight.”

Harrison threw his arms over Steve’s shoulders and clung to his back as they shot down the line. Steve took three running steps as he hit the ground and then let Harrison disengage. Tony flew over their heads, Clint in tow, and they followed his path toward the waiting helicopter.

They were only a few meters away – close enough to see Tony depositing Clint near the front strut and Rumlow examining the stolen case – when Harrison suddenly shouted and dropped to his knees.

Steve whirled back around and crouched in front of the agent where he had lurched forward toward the ground. Steve scanned quickly for any sign of injury. He hadn’t heard any shots fired. Had Harrison been hit earlier and Steve hadn’t noticed? Tony was there in a second, dropping into position so that he could put the armor between Harrison and the warehouse.

“What’s the situation, kid?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”

Harrison seemed unable to answer, his hands clutched to the side of his head as he doubled over in pain.

“We have to get him to medical,” Steve said. “Agent Harrison, I’m going to carry you to evac.”

Steve swept the smaller man up easily in his arms, running over to where Rumlow and Clint were waiting. He was just getting the agent arranged on a stretcher in the helicopter when he heard the sound of more blades warming up. Shit. That meant the terrorists were going to mount a pursuit. Steve looked over at Tony.

“I’m on it, Cap,” he acknowledged, and shot upwards to provide air support. Steve jumped into the back of the chopper and yelled a tense “go” to May in the pilot’s seat.

Harrison still had his hands locked around his skull as they took off, his body rolling to the right as he curled in on himself.

“My head…feels like a spike,” he managed.

“Barton,” May called out. Clint ran up to grab the small scanner she had detached from her belt. Hurrying back to Harrison’s side, he moved the device in circles around the agent’s head and neck. Outside, Steve could hear Tony exchanging fire with what now sounded like multiple air crafts, and he had to force himself to focus on what May’s team was saying over the comms.

“FitzSimmons, what’s happening?” May snapped.

Fitz and Simmons jumped onto the line, talking almost on top of each other as they reviewed the readings.

“I’m picking up a small explosive device,” Fitz started.

“It’s at the base of the skull, by the olfactory nerves,” Simmons added. “They must have injected it through the nasal cavity.”

“Energy readings are climbing, so it’s probably been activated remotely. Given its location –”

“– the damage will be lethal.”

“What do we do?” Steve asked, holding one hand to the side of Harrison’s head to steady him as he convulsed in pain again.

“There’s no time to remove it. It’s too close to the brain stem.”

“You’ll have to short it out. You could use –”

“A defibrillator.”

“Or a targeted EMP.”

“Iron Man?” Steve asked sharply.

“On my way,” Tony replied, and Steve could hear a shift in the roaring noise around them as Tony shot toward the helicopter. Harrison gave another shout, his hands digging into the skin around his eyes.

“I can’t,” he groaned.

“Hurry, Stark,” Steve barked.

“Coming as fast as I can,” Tony shot back.

“Hold on,” Steve told Harrison. “Help is coming. We’re going to –”

He never got to finish the sentence, because at that moment there was a high-pitched whine, and Harrison went limp, one eye lurching to the side as the explosive detonated.

Steve sat back on his heels. Clint swore. The archer’s face looked as empty as it had in the briefing room, but there was something soft in the motion of his hands as he reached forward to close Harrison’s eyes. He had just finished when Tony flew through the open side of the helicopter, landing in a crouch. He didn’t raise his faceplate, and Steve wasn’t sure whether he could have met Tony’s gaze anyway. The Iron Man armor straightened, and Tony shot one furious repulsor blast out the door before turning to face the front window.

For the rest of the ride back to their makeshift base, everything was silent except for the dull whir of the helicopter blades. Somewhere in the back of Steve’s mind, Bucky was falling over and over, and Nick Fury was dropping a set of bloody trading cards onto a table, but Steve shoved all of that deep into the ice. Finish the mission. The losses would keep for later. They always did.

When they touched down, a group of agents ran toward them, including a young pair that Steve assumed must be Fitz and Simmons. Simmons took charge of Harrison’s body while Fitz hurried around the other side of the helicopter to collect the battered case from Rumlow.

“Not sure what survived the explosion. I had to jump to avoid a grenade,” Steve heard Rumlow saying.

But he didn’t pause to hear the rest, because Tony had taken off after Simmons, and Steve stepped out after him. Tony beckoned for the two agents carrying the stretcher to stop, and as he leaned over Harrison’s body, the side of his face was just visible. The lines at the corners of his mouth were pinched tight, and Steve felt something painful squeeze through the numbness in his chest. As Steve approached, Tony straightened and waved the stretcher on.

“Tony –” Steve started, but Tony whirled on him, eyes blazing.

“Save me the speech, Rogers. It’s not my first solider this time, right? I remember the spiel. He knew the risks, and we did everything we could, and I can’t blame myself. But he was practically a kid and now he’s dead. So if it’s okay with you, I’m going to skip the whole ‘died a hero’ part and go get blindingly drunk.”

And without waiting for a reply, Tony snapped his faceplate down and took off.

Steve stood staring at the place where Tony had been, grinding his teeth as he counted slowly to ten in his head. Five weeks on the road, and whatever clear air he had managed to store up could still be punched out of him with one look.

He turned to scan the lot for Clint. He needed to get out of here and find something he could hit hard enough to make the welts and bruises on the outside more painful than the ones inside.

Clint had just stepped off the helicopter and begun to make his way in Steve’s direction, but he stopped when May called out his name. Clint turned to look at her, and Steve could see his posture go rigid when she pulled him into a hug. Over her shoulder, Clint’s face looked startled, then alert. As she pulled back, his eyes scanned rapidly across her face, and then his tense expression shifted into a carefully harmless grin.

“Thanks. Take care, Melinda,” Clint said. He walked toward Steve while May headed off after Fitz and Rumlow.

 “What was that?” Steve asked.

“Something’s up,” Clint replied grimly. “She said Fury’s keeping more secrets than we know.”

Chapter Text

“Tony,” Bruce said, “you need to rest.”

Tony looked up from the electrical sensors he’d been pulverizing to see that Bruce had stopped pretending to work and was hovering nearby with a frown on his face.

“I’m resting right now, Brucie,” Tony grinned, shooting another micro blast from his gauntlet at the sensors. JARVIS added the readings to the graph, and soon Tony would know exactly what frequency of electromagnetic pulse would have shorted out the explosive attached to Harrison’s skull with the least collateral damage.

“I rest very actively. This is me at rest.”

“You need to sleep,” Bruce retorted more firmly. “You’ve been in down here for days, and you’ve consumed enough of that –” he gestured at the open bottle of vodka “– to strip the paint off the quinjet.”

“Now that’s an experiment we could try if you’re bored,” Tony suggested. Bruce’s frown deepened. “That was a joke, Bruce: to show you how well rested I am. Don’t look so dour. I’m fine, okay? You don’t need to keep mother-Hulking me just because you drew the short straw and got ‘manic Tony’ duty.”

Things had been rough since the botched rescue mission. Natasha, Bruce, and Thor hadn’t had much more success in Toronto than the extraction team had had in Jersey. Agent Ward had downloaded some encrypted files while Natasha distracted a room of security guards, but most of the information he’d grabbed had turned out to be garbled nonsense. On the other hand, the away team had at least managed to run their op without racking up any casualties. That must be why they had decided to divide and shock-absorb for those who hadn’t been so lucky. Natasha had been sparring with Steve in the gym to keep him from breaking his fists against another set of punching bags or running the entire coast of New York. Thor seemed to be taking Clint on a tour of all the diviest bars in the metro area, encouraging him to throw himself into darts rather than off roofs. So it had fallen to Bruce to keep Tony company in his workshop. And, presumably, to stop Tony from going back on TV and inviting the Mandarin once again to “come at him.”

That part had been a mistake, Tony was willing to admit. If the reporters hadn’t caught him so soon after the mission – if he’d had time to drown the memory of Steve begging him to hurry with just a little bit more liquor. But the news crews had been camped outside the Tower the morning after, when Tony was still buzzing from pulling an all-nighter to avoid nightmares and childhood heroes. And when the first microphone was shoved in his face, Tony’s mouth had started running immediately.

“I’m down here because I’m your friend,” Bruce said, softly but firmly. “And because you’re not the only one on the team who tries to avoid your problems by solving different ones.”

Or causing different ones, Tony thought wryly, and he threw back another shot so he wouldn’t have to meet Bruce’s eyes. He knew he was being an asshole. Bruce’s presence in the workshop had actually been surprisingly soothing, and part of Tony wanted nothing more than to lie down on the couch and talk to his friend until every vibrating thought in his head was spilling onto the floor. But if he tried to explain why he couldn’t leave the workshop, he would have to explain that he couldn’t bear to go to his bedroom; and that would involve explaining that he and Pepper had broken up; and that would probably lead to something horrifying, like crying uncontrollably, so asshole it was.

“Fine,” Bruce sighed. “I’m sorry to do this, Tony, but you leave me no choice.”

He turned and walked out of the workshop – to go find people who ate and slept like functional adults, Tony assumed – and Tony turned back to the electrical sensors.

“Crank it, JARVIS,” he said, and Black Sabbath blasted over the audio system, so loud that he could almost forget he knew what absolute quiet sounded like.

He had only made it through four songs and thirty repulsor blasts, however, before the music suddenly cut out. Tony was just warming up a joke about Bruce’s weak bluffing skills when he looked up and felt his heart jump out of his chest. Because it wasn’t Bruce. It was Steve.

Bruce must have fetched him from the gym, because Steve’s cheeks were pink and his skin was covered in a sheen of sweat. His shirt clung to his chest, and wow that last shot of vodka had been a mistake, because Tony actually gulped at the way Steve’s arm muscles flexed as he gripped the worktable.

“Well if it isn’t America’s favorite PSA,” Tony quipped acidly to cover his reaction. “You here to give me the ‘look what you’re doing to your mother’ speech? I should warn you that mixing alcohol and parental disappointment has not worked out well for me in the past.”

That earned him a clenched jaw and a furrowed brow. Good. At least Steve angry was better than Steve distant or stoic – Steve as he had looked in the helicopter, so goddamn impassive that Tony couldn’t tell whether he was literally made of stone or whether he was trying to conceal a mortal injury.

“You need to sleep,” Steve announced, battlefield voice in full force.

“You’ve been doing a lot of sleeping, there, Cap? It doesn’t look like you were nestled in your bed dreaming of sugarplums when Bruce found you.”

“I’ve seen my bed in the last 72 hours, which I gather is more than you can say.”

“Well you’ve got me there. You win. I’ll have JARVIS alert the press and print out your award for the fridge: Steve Rogers, still the better hero.”

“I didn’t come down here to fight, Stark,” Steve practically growled.

“Could have fooled me,” Tony snipped. “You’re going to pull a muscle holding that judgey glare.”

“I know you don’t want to talk to me,” Steve continued doggedly. “You’ve made that very clear. But Bruce is worried about you. I’m – everyone is worried. I know I can’t stop you from treating your life casually, but you can’t ask us to watch you hurt yourself and do nothing.”

“I’m in my workshop, where I work, Captain Melodrama. If you’re all going to call in the crisis negotiators every time I have a casual Tuesday night—”

“You went on television and gave a terrorist your home address!” Steve exploded.

Ah, there it was. Well, Tony supposed it had been too much to hope that Steve was still so confused by twenty-first-century technology that he had somehow missed the endless replays of the interview on social media.

“If it makes you feel any better, Cap, the Malibu house is pretty easy to find anyway. I’m not one for subtlety, as you’ve been known to point out. In fact, you’d love the place – plenty of coastline where you could run yourself into the ground to take the edge off.”

“That does not make me feel better,” Steve ground out. “And stop changing the subject.”

“No this is the subject, Rogers. Because this Tower sure has a lot of self-appointed babysitters for a group of people whose unhealthy coping mechanisms could fill an Intro to Psych textbook.”

Steve’s jaw muscles gave a spasm.

“We’re trying, Stark. That’s all I’m asking – that you just try —”

“You don’t think I’m trying?” Tony broke in, a sharp pang of hurt metabolizing rapidly into simmering anger. “This looks like giving up to you? Because I only fight for myself, right? Well fuck you, Cap. You think I don’t care that you had to watch an agent die in your arms because I didn’t get there fast enough?”

“Jesus, Tony, you think that’s how I feel? No one could have gotten there faster. I should have —” Steve broke off and gripped the table again. Tony wasn’t sure he even knew he was leaving dents in the metal. “I saw Harrison’s nose was bleeding and I didn’t think to check for an injection. Then he tried to tell me something in the warehouse – asked me to turn my comms off – and now I keep wondering: if I had heard what he was going to say, could I have saved him?”

Steve looked up, and the fight seemed to seep out of him. His grip on the table went loose, and he let out a long sigh.

“I don’t blame you, Tony. And I understand why you can’t stop blaming yourself. We just want to help take care of you when you can’t be careful with yourself.”

Steve reached down to pull his phone out of his pocket, flicked his fingers across the screen, and slid it across the table. Tony saw that it was open to the very earliest messages on the group text. The first three were from Tony: a link to a feature story about the Battle of New York that contained a clip of the Hulk punching Thor; a video of a hawk making a clumsy landing; a photo of the take-out menu for Thai Palace with the caption “next time Romanov has to order her own spring rolls.” After that the team had started chiming in: Natasha with a GIF of someone making a stabbing motion with scissors, and Clint with a text that said, “drubk on roof bring cheeetos.” Finally, the first photo from Steve appeared. He was lying in the grass, head propped against a bunched-up sweatshirt, holding a bag of Cheetos. “Hope someone saved Clint,” the caption read.

“I tried to run away from something that was bothering me. I thought it would be easier for everyone if I dealt with it on my own. But you made sure I had company anyway,” Steve said, his voice so earnest that it made Tony’s chest ache. “Please let us do the same for you. If you don’t want it to be me, I get it. But let me call Rhodey. Or Pepper, she could —”

“We broke up,” Tony blurted out. Steve froze.

It was an effort for Tony to look at his face. He was so afraid of finding pity – or a knowing glance that said, “well, of course…who didn’t see that coming?” But Steve’s expression wasn’t what he expected. There was sympathy there, yes, but also something else Tony couldn’t quite read. Guilt, maybe?

“It’s not because of the team,” Tony continued, in case he had interpreted Steve’s expression correctly. “Well, it’s not only because of the team. Mostly it’s me. I know I’m not…easy for people to care about. I got my convoy bombed, got kidnapped and tortured, poisoned by the thing I invented to save my life – oh and didn’t tell anyone, that was a real crowd pleaser. Then after flying a nuke into space I picked a fight with a terrorist on cable news. You’ll be happy to know you weren’t the only one pissed about that little stunt. But even that wasn’t enough to drive her away.”

Tony flexed the gauntlet on his hand a few times and then retracted it into the metal bracelet around his wrist.

“The night after the interview, I called the suit in my sleep. Honestly, I can’t remember where I thought I was this time. Sometimes it’s the cave or the sonic paralysis – or everyone’s favorite, the wormhole special. But this time Pepper was right next to me. She was asleep right next to me, and I called the suit because my strung-out subconscious can’t take one goddamn night off, and I could have —”

Tony broke off, unable to complete the sentence. Steve was watching him steadily, his body completely still as if he feared any sudden movement might startle Tony out of talking.

“I know I’m a mess, Cap. It might look I’m not trying to stop it from hurting people, but I am. That’s why I’m down here.”

Suddenly, Tony felt drained, as if trying to hold that confession back had been the only thing keeping him standing. He slumped onto the stool behind him. His body was heavy with exhaustion and vodka and some muzzy-but-desperate yearning. For a second, he thought about finding something to weld or hammer – anything to put a little metal between the world and his abrupt urge to weep without ceasing – but his hands had started shaking, and he wasn’t sure he should risk it.

Steve stared at him for a long moment, his face unreadable, and then turned and walked resolutely over to the couch in the corner of the workshop.

“Okay. Well I’m going to be over here watching Spaceballs not getting the jokes,” he said, taking a seat on one end of the couch and booting up the projector. “You can keep electrocuting things, or you can come lie down and explain the punch lines to me until you pass out.”

Tony hesitated a moment, struggling against the fight instinct insisting he should keep working to prove a point (what point? unimportant) and the flight reflex screaming at him to high-tail it out of there before he curled up in Steve’s lap like a cat. But finally he surrendered, shuffling over and lying across the length of the couch, the top of his head barely resting on the edge of Steve’s thigh.

“How did you know Spaceballs would work?” he asked as the movie started.

“When I bought that new jacket in Charleston without, and I quote, ‘consulting you,’ you posted a video of someone saying ‘you went over my helmet’ to the group chat. I looked it up.”

“That’s very sneaky of you, Rogers,” Tony replied. His voice was a bit slow, he noticed, and he couldn’t quite muster the focus to wag a finger for emphasis. “I don’t know if it’s good for you to be spending so much time around spies.”

“Says the guy who hacks Nick Fury’s personal files twice a week.”

“You are…a hot door knob.” That didn’t seem quite like what he had meant to say.

“Go to sleep, Tony,” Steve said, and Tony must have been even more out of it than he had thought, because the sound of his own name felt like a physical touch. Tony found he really did want to close his eyes and sink into it. He barely heard a line of the movie before he was drifting off, feeling the warmth of Steve’s presence above him, almost as if someone were ghosting fingers lightly through his hair.

He woke up in his own bed, his phone pinging as a doodle of DUM-E in an oversized Iron Man helmet appeared in the group text.

Morale seemed to improve after Tony emerged from his workshop, but the team remained on edge as the final days of the Mandarin’s one-week timeline elapsed.

At first, Steve had expected to be called in at any moment. The two locations they had infiltrated during their last mission had since been abandoned, but SHIELD had been scrambling for fresh leads, anticipating increased activity as Fury failed to hand over the TAHITI files. Steve asked the team to be ready to assemble as soon as SHIELD found a target, so they spent a lot of time doing light training exercises and sifting through their daily briefings.

The fifth time Steve called them all to the kitchen to go back over the latest reports, Tony announced that he couldn’t take Steve pacing around like a stressed cat anymore. And since the team could wait for a phone call just as easily while having fun as they could while treading thin spots in his carpet, Tony ordered three hours a day of team Super Smash Brothers to blow off steam. They broke two controllers and one precariously placed lamp in the days that followed. But the promised deadline came and went without any detectable activity from the Mandarin.

“Maybe the Mandarin was bluffing all along,” Bruce suggested when they talked through the mystery over late-night sushi. “Maybe he got lucky with the first bombing and never actually had the resources to keep it going.”

“That building in Toronto was not short on personnel,” Natasha demurred. “Maybe not enough to take down a high-security target, but enough to give us another warning shot. I think it’s more likely the threat was a decoy than a bluff.”

“A decoy from what?” Steve asked. “You think he’s not really after the TAHITI files?”

“Or he thinks he has another way of getting them,” Natasha mused, picking a tempura roll off Thor’s plate. “And he wanted us to be looking for an explosion instead.”

“Fury said there might be a leak,” Clint chimed in. He was leaning back in his chair, balancing it on two legs while he juggled packets of soy sauce. Every few minutes Thor threw another packet into the air, and Clint caught it and added it to the mix. “Maybe the Mandarin’s got a homicidal inside man,” he continued, and then, at a glance from Natasha, amended, “I mean a homicidal inside person.”

“Or SHIELD has actually been getting tons of intel about the Mandarin, and Fury’s just not sharing,” Tony suggested, drumming his chopsticks absently on the edge of the table. “Hell, Director Need-to-Know could have the Mandarin locked up in some secret facility right now, tucked away with all the other under-the-table projects SHIELD makes disappear.”

All the theories sounded plausible, and none of them seemed sufficient. Steve couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something – something that should be right in front of him.

But he could only hold the team on pause for so long waiting for another shoe to belatedly drop. Tony was already behind on his work for Stark Industries. Thor and Bruce had never gotten to finish their research visit to New Mexico. And Fury wanted Steve, Natasha, and Clint for other missions. So Steve tried to put the unanswered questions to the back of his mind.

Truth be told, he had some other preoccupations waiting to take their place. Ever since the night in the workshop, Steve had been finding ways to spend more time with Tony. He didn’t want to push his luck, but Tony had opened the door just a little bit, and Steve was almost incapable of giving up ground once he had gained it. So he had taken to doing his reading in the common areas, where he could often catch Tony coming up for coffee at odd hours. And when he felt particularly brave, he brought his sketchbook down to the workshop and doodled on the couch while Tony went over designs or tested alloys or bantered with JARVIS.

More and more, Tony would banter with Steve too – even call him over to lift something or to test a piece of equipment. That’s how Steve learned that as bewilderingly fast as Tony’s words moved, his mind moved faster. Watching Tony work was like being on his bike: the more the machine accelerated, the quicker his instincts would get.

Of course, the potential of a real friendship with Tony was already too far beyond Steve’s initial expectations for him to entertain hopes of anything more. Tony had just gotten out of a relationship with someone he still loved and trusted. And Steve was pretty sure he wouldn’t have been Tony’s type anyway. But Tony didn’t seem to mind his company. He’d even started seeking Steve out in the gym sometimes to spar or to lounge on a workout bench and talk about his latest project while Steve boxed a punching bag.

It was on one of these occasions that they got a visit from Agent Ward.

They had been in the middle of close-quarters practice – trying out different ways to incapacitate an attacker with hits or twists to the instep, ankles, wrists, groin – but it had devolved fairly quickly into a tripping contest.

“You gonna knock over an old man?” Steve grinned as Tony tried to hook his ankle with one foot.

“Don’t even try to pull the aww-shucks, old-timer card with me, Cap,” Tony fired back. “Your joints only qualify as old if you count the 70-year ice pack you applied. Your ligaments are probably sprier than ever after decades of RICE.”

“You can’t use your newfangled acronyms to confuse me,” Steve protested, gripping one of Tony’s shoulders carefully while jumping back to put his feet out of range of the shorter man’s legs. “That’s cheating.”

Tony twisted gracefully out of Steve’s hold and then jabbed a few rapid rounds at his outstretched hands.

“You’re accusing me of trickery, Rogers?” he replied, “That’s rich coming from the guy who deliberately spilled his beer all over Clint to win our last Smash melee.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Steve said blandly.

He dropped quickly into a crouch and swept his right leg at Tony’s ankles. Tony jumped, almost in time to avoid the attack, but he lost his balance as Steve’s leg grazed the tips of his toes. Even before his brain could fully register the possible danger, Steve shot forward to grab Tony by the waist and stop him from landing awkwardly.

Tony grasped Steve’s forearms, whether to steady himself or out of surprise, Steve couldn’t tell. But he didn’t let go; so when Steve stood up from his lunge, he found that he was looking down into Tony’s eyes from very close range, his fingers still pressed against the slivers of skin exposed at the hem of Tony’s shirt.

He thought he should probably ask whether Tony was okay – or make a joke to cut the tension that was making the air in the room feel thicker all of a sudden – but the only thoughts he could formulate were mortifying variations of “wow” and “beautiful.”

They stayed like that for what might have been ten seconds or ten hours before Steve heard Natasha’s wry voice from across the gym.

“Sorry to interrupt, boys. I didn’t see a sock on the door.”

Steve jumped back, his cheeks burning.

“Technically, I didn’t fall, and so that doesn’t count as a win,” Tony told him, his voice every bit as calm and breezy as Steve didn’t feel.

Of course Tony sounded breezy, Steve reminded himself. Tony hadn’t just lost yet another round of Get It Together, Rogers, For God’s Sake: You’re A Grown Man. Bucky’s eyes would be rolling out of his head.

“What do you want, Romanov?” Tony continued. “Did Thor light the microwave on fire again? I told him he can’t keep demonstrating his worthiness by using the hammer to speed-nuke Hot Pockets.”

“Ward’s here – the specialist from May’s team,” Natasha said. “They have some new intel they want us to look at.”

“You could have had JARVIS alert us,” Tony pointed out, grabbing a towel and wiping off his face as he made his way toward Natasha. “You know this is basically a fully functional Smart House, right?”

“And miss a chance to watch you two play footsie? No way,” Natasha said. “I would destroy you both at that game, by the way.”

“That’s why you weren’t invited,” Tony agreed.

They made their way up to the common room, where Thor, Bruce, and Clint had already gathered around the couch with a clean-cut, dark-haired man who Steve assumed must be Agent Ward. Ward and Clint had been chatting affably, but Ward’s posture straightened as the rest of the team approached.

“Agent Ward,” Steve greeted him with a nod. “What do you have for us?”

“Captain Rogers,” Ward replied. “You’ve already met our consultant, Skye. Ever since the Mandarin’s threat fell through she’s been watching the web for mentions of his name. Most of the chatter looks like run-of-the-mill conspiracy theories. But she found this anonymous video circulating on Reddit, and she wanted to be sure you saw it as soon as possible.”

He pulled a small metal disk out of his pocket and clicked a button on the side. A video image appeared projected above it.

“JARVIS, throw it on the big screen,” Tony said.

“Right away, sir,” JARVIS replied, and the same video started playing on the flat-screen television.

On the display, the man who had called himself the Mandarin in the broadcast weeks ago was sitting at a long, cluttered dressing table with his face angled toward a large mirror. He was talking, seemingly to the person recording the video. But his voice didn’t sound anything like the measured, lilting intonation the Mandarin had used when issuing his demands. This time he sounded British – and extremely drunk.

“Told me they wanted me for a whole series of videos,” he was rambling at the unseen recorder. “Said it was going to be a long-term gig and all, which is why I took it on such short notice. I’m pretty busy, you know – I do get work. But they only used the one scene, and now they’ve just left me here to twiddle my thumbs. Which would be fine, but I never actually got paid, did I?” As he spoke, he was clumsily removing what looked like stage make up with a washcloth, gradually revealing –

“The Mandarin is some white dude?” Clint burst out incredulously.

“It would appear so. Skye ran the video through voice and face recognition searches, and she thinks he’s an English actor. Trevor Slattery. No priors and no hits in the SHIELD databases.”

“So they just dressed him up like that to – what? Make him seem scarier? That’s super racist,” Clint shook his head.

“And what does it say about us that we bought it?” Bruce added ruefully.

“So there’s a shadowy ‘they’ involved, and whoever ‘they’ are, ‘they’ played us,” Tony agreed. He was practically vibrating with energy, Steve noticed, bouncing on the balls of his feet and tapping one finger rhythmically against the place where the arc reactor glowed through his shirt. “They pulled out a little Orientalist song and dance to distract us, and it worked, so let’s put Edward Said on the Avengers reading list, and let’s get busy figuring out who these bastards are. They’re changing tactics, and I want to know why. Cap?”

Steve realized he had been staring at the nervous, precise way Tony’s fingers beat out the tempo of his thoughts, always just a bit faster than his words. He tore his eyes away, only to notice that Ward had been watching him. By the time Steve met Ward’s eyes, the agent’s expression was aloof, but Steve could swear he had caught a sharpness there just a second ago.

Well, he was being pretty obvious, Steve supposed. Maybe Agent Ward was a homophobe.

“Did Skye discover anything about who made the video?” Steve asked him.

“No,” Ward replied, his face totally neutral now. “But she’s working on it. It was posted to a subreddit speculating about who the Mandarin is and what he’s after. But whoever uploaded it didn’t include any explanation. The post originated from a public library in Trenton, and it was deleted just a few hours later.”

The team exchanged glances around the circle, and Steve gave a small nod.

“Thanks for bringing this to us, Ward,” Natasha said, in what Steve recognized as her Black Widow voice. She moved in close to the other agent, swaying into his space, and then pressed his hand warmly before smoothly sliding the disk into her own. “This footage is going to be a huge help to us.”

Something flashed across Ward’s face for the slightest of seconds as he saw Natasha pocket the disk, and then it was gone.

“No need to thank me, Romanov. I’m just the messenger,” he replied. “I’ll be in touch personally if we find anything else. Some members of my team were pretty shaken up by what happened in New Jersey, and I want to take care of these guys as soon as we can.”

Steve shook Ward’s hand, and Thor walked with him toward the elevators, one hand clapped on the agent’s shoulder.

“When we meet again,” he boomed heartily, “I will have to hear more about your adventures with the Berseker staff. The last time I held it, I felt so crazed for battle that I tried to use my friend Volstagg as a javelin. I forgot we were in the banquet hall. Cleared a full seven-course meal with one toss.”

The team waited until the doors closed on Ward before turning back toward each other.

“Giving SHIELD the supernatural strong-arm,” Tony said to Thor. “A bit surprising after how many times you volunteered for the ‘trust fall’ portion of Hill’s team-building exercises.”

“I trust Natasha,” Thor responded simply. “And Natasha doesn’t trust him.”

“I’ll trust him a little more or less after I go through this disk myself,” Natasha replied. “But I don’t like this set up. Why would May send her specialist to deliver this information? Why not turn it over to Fury and let him handle the briefing? Why not send Skye to explain what she found herself?”

“I don’t know,” Steve responded, shaking his head against the itching sensation on the back of his neck – like seeing a face that should be familiar but being unable to remember the name.

“Neither do I,” Natasha admitted. “And it’s starting to seriously annoy me.”

Chapter Text

As soon as Tony caught sight of Steve at the kitchen sink, he knew something was wrong.

Steve had been called away shortly after the meeting with Ward and had been gone for two days on a mission somewhere in the Indian Ocean with Natasha and the SHIELD strike team. It was pure coincidence that Tony was catching him so soon after he got back, because he definitely hadn’t told JARVIS to alert him as soon as Steve and Natasha returned to the Tower. And since he couldn’t have known the mission was over, Tony definitely hadn’t moved up his coffee run to increase the chance of bumping into them to confirm they were okay. Why would he be worried? After all, he definitely hadn’t hacked into Steve’s mission report, so there was no way he could have known that Steve and Natasha had barely avoided an explosion in the computer bay of the ship they’d infiltrated.

Steve had downplayed the incident in the report that Tony hadn’t read, so Tony was instantly on alert when he saw the tense hunch of Steve’s shoulders and the iron grip he had on the edge of the counter. The water in the sink was running, hot enough to raise a small cloud of steam, but Steve seemed to have forgotten about it. He gave no notice of Tony’s approach, a slow flexing of his fingers the only sign of movement Tony could detect.

“Did that counter try to mug an old lady, Cap?” Tony asked lightly, pouring himself a mug of coffee while he examined what he could see of Steve’s face.

Steve seemed to notice his grip for the first time and let go with a grimace. He leaned forward to shut off the tap, his head tilting just enough for Tony to see the bruises mottling the left side of his face.

Fuck. What had that looked like before hours of super-solider healing? Trust Steve to describe having half his head turned into a Rorschach painting as “receiving minor contusions.”

Hypothetically, of course. Steve might have used words like those, but Tony wouldn’t know; because only someone with a serious fixation issue would have memorized Steve’s mission report.

Tony whirled toward the freezer, where Clint and Natasha had taken to stocking a range of post-battle ice packs. Selecting one of the soft-sided ones, he reached out to turn Steve’s face toward him. But as soon as his fingers brushed Steve’s jaw, Steve flinched backward as if Tony had shocked him.

“Sorry,” Steve said, grimacing even harder.

“No that’s my fault,” Tony replied quickly. “I should have asked.” He held out the hand with the ice pack. “May I?”

Steve paused and then nodded. Tony gently took Steve’s chin in one hand to anchor himself and touched the ice pack to the largest clump of bruises, near Steve’s left temple. He tried to keep the pressure light, but Steve’s face remained drawn, his jaw flexing under Tony’s hand.

“Does this hurt?” Tony asked.

Steve let out a small huff of air, a wry smile twisting one side of his mouth.

“The bruise is fine,” he responded.

“I don’t know if you know this, but my Draper Prize was actually awarded for achievements in deflection. So don’t think I missed that dodge,” Tony said. “And as much as I enjoy watching a fellow artist at work, you look like you’re about to crack a tooth trying to keep a lid on it. So. You want to talk?”

Steve’s eyes held his for a long moment, and Tony wished, not for the first time, that he could see whatever battle Steve fought against himself in these moments. Normally, Tony’s instinct would be to experiment until he got a bigger reaction: to find a pressure point to squeeze or a sensitive spot to needle. But right now, Tony realized, all he wanted to do was to run his thumb gently along Steve’s jaw until the tension drained away.

God, he was so fucked.

And okay, it wasn’t like there hadn’t been signs. Rhodey had tried to warn him weeks ago. Pepper had called him out on it just yesterday, when they had gotten together to strategize about the upcoming board meeting.

“You should tell him,” Pepper had said, her voice soft and sad in a way that made Tony want to build another company just so he could give it to her. Tony hadn’t thought he was confessing anything in particular – he had been talking about the way Steve’s face screwed up with concentration when he programmed the coffee maker – but she had known. Maybe she had known for a while.

Tony had considered blowing past it or passing it off as a joke, but he knew he couldn’t pull that off. Not with Pepper – not about this.

“He’s lonely, Pep,” Tony had said instead. “You should see his face sometimes when he thinks no one’s looking. It’s like someone yanked out his insides months ago and he’s been trying to hide it by keeping his superhuman abs clenched all the time. He needs the team. He needs a friend. I can’t mess that up just because I’m a greedy son of a bitch.”

Pepper had just shaken her head and squeezed his hand.

“I’m not sure I’m fighting the right battles,” Steve said finally, snapping Tony out of his reverie.

He realized he’d been gazing into Steve’s eyes, and he gave himself a mental shake. Right, Tony: you offered to listen, not to swoon over how soft his eyelashes look up close.

Tony turned away to grab a couple beers from the fridge and – when he thought he saw Steve’s face fall slightly – switched out his own beer for a bottle of seltzer. He held out the beer to Steve before boosting himself up on the counter, settling into a spot where he would be less tempted to try to soften Steve’s frown in a distinctly un-friend-like manner.

Steve shifted his weight marginally before continuing, and Tony added to his list of “frankly heroic feats of self-control” by not pointing out how heroically self-controlled he was being.

“Our mission almost went sideways,” Steve resumed. “It turns out Rumlow had separate instructions – something about data extraction. He missed the rendez-vous point, so we went to look for him. When we found him downloading files, I lost my temper, and a grenade almost blew up in Nat’s face because of it. I can’t stop replaying it. It was like I was back in that helicopter again – people getting hurt because I can’t see the whole field.”

“Fury doesn’t like to share his view of the field,” Tony pointed out. “It’s becoming a bit of a pattern.”

“And I always see it too late,” Steve retorted. “You looked into Project TAHITI. You were the one who knew to search for the weapons on the helicarrier. I sensed something was wrong, but I wouldn’t have done anything about it if you hadn’t pushed me. I was just trying to get through the mission.”

“Well in your defense, you had some other things to process at the time. And unlike some of us, you hadn’t recently experienced what it’s like to have Fury plant a lethal assassin on your senior staff. That kind of thing makes a man feel a little paranoid.”

“Nat said you gave her a very generous severance package,” Steve replied, a small smile tugging at one side of his mouth.

“If by ‘severance package’ you mean she drained her corporate account and raided my liquor stash on her way out, then yes,” Tony agreed. “Also I can’t prove this, but I think she’s the one who reprogrammed my office computer to play ‘You’re So Vain’ every time it reboots.”

Steve’s smile widened fractionally, and Tony felt his own shoulders loosen in response.

“Look we’ve all taken a few hits lately,” he pushed on. “But it isn’t all on you. That’s what you told me, right? Let the team take some of the punches with you. And you know what else that means: you’ve got backup wherever you go. You don’t have to fight for SHIELD if you don’t want to.”

“It’s what I was literally made to do, Tony,” Steve shrugged. “I’m government funded and Stark engineered.” He winced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean –”

“Don’t sweat it,” Tony waved his hand. “Contrary to what recent events might suggest, I can hear my father mentioned without threatening to beat a decorated war hero. And you must miss him sometimes. Tell you what. Because you’ve had a rough day, I’ll give you a freebie: tell me something you preferred about him. I’ve heard them all before.”

“Well he did pay a higher rate of federal taxes,” Steve replied blandly.

Tony snorted.

“Okay, Captain Sass,” he grinned. “Keep your secrets. But just – you can talk about that stuff if you want to, okay? With Nat – or Bruce is pretty good listener when he’s not the size of a tractor-trailer. But it could be me too. I mean, I spilled my guts to you a few weeks back, so you owe me at least one mortifying confession anyway.”

Steve didn’t respond immediately, so Tony let the offer hang. His phone was vibrating, and he looked down at the screen to give Steve cover if he wanted to decline the confidence. Pepper was calling for the second time, which could only mean bad news about the board meeting. Well, never doubt Tony Stark’s ability to avoid a reality check. He shoved the phone back in his pocket.

“I do miss them,” Steve said quietly, and Tony stilled immediately. “Every day after SHIELD found me I wished Bucky would show up and give me hell for moping around. Sometimes I can almost hear him telling me to quit being a drama queen, and I wonder whether it’s better or worse that the serum will never let me forget what his voice sounded like. I still get a talking-to from Peggy sometimes, and I’m grateful. But she’s lived a whole life now, and I’m still stuck between two. We can’t seem to meet in the same time. Either she’s decades beyond me or she’s back in the past.”

“You loved her,” Tony said.

“I loved them both,” Steve replied, a stubborn set to his jaw. “Bucky and I didn’t know how to picture a future for what we had before the war. So when he decided to enlist, we gave it up. We both figured we’d get married eventually anyway. Have families. But some things really are better nowadays. If I could only tell him what was going to be possible later –”

Steve broke off, easing the tightness in his voice with a swig of beer.

Tony tried to use the pause to process as rapidly as possible the revelation that Steve had had a relationship with a man. It wasn’t a surprise, of course, that Steve was attracted to men. Steve hadn’t talked to Tony about his taste in partners, but Tony had spent decades perfecting his sixth sense for when someone was checking him out. He knew the effect of his impeccably tailored pants was not lost on Steve. But he hadn’t known Steve had actually been in love with a man – with Bucky freaking Barnes, of all people.

“I guess it makes sense that part didn’t end up in the history books,” Tony mused. His phone was still vibrating in his pocket, and he jabbed the switch to silence it. “But I have to tell you I would have enjoyed my Captain America comics even more growing up if I had known that Steve Rogers swung both ways.”

“Bucky always said I had a type.”

“Oh yeah? Do tell.”

“Snarky brunettes who can kick my ass,” Steve smiled, then froze, his face flushing rapidly.

Tony felt his heart rate quicken.

Okay, so…that could have been a complete coincidence. Steve clearly hadn’t meant to imply anything. And now he was probably embarrassed because he didn’t want Tony to get the wrong idea. Or maybe it was just like – a little crush. The pants thing. Tony had very well-made pants, and Steve had noticed. But Steve was definitely not signaling that he wanted anything from Tony, because now he clearly looked like he wanted to bolt out of the room and never return. Speaking of which, Tony should probably be saying something and not just sitting there staring.

“You’ve got good taste,” Tony said finally, his voice coming out a little huskier than he had intended.

Steve’s expression was still mortified, but there was something else creeping in as well – a set to his shoulders and jaw that Tony associated with phrases like “there are still civilians in that building” and “I want you to launch me through that third-floor window.”

Tony didn’t feel like he could risk any further response of his own, because some part of his brain had started rambling out increasingly unhelpful suggestions like, “stand up so he can see the pants in action,” and who knew what would come out if he opened his mouth again.

“Tony –” Steve started.

“Excuse me, sir,” JARVIS announced, “but Ms. Potts has initiated the override sequence, and I will have to put her call through the building P.A. system if you do not pick up your phone.”

“Shit,” Tony swore, louder than was probably merited. “JARVIS you’re a traitor, and I’m scrapping your programing for this insurrection.” He grabbed the phone and swiped angrily to answer.

“Tony you can’t ignore my calls just because you know I have bad news,” Pepper’s voice launched in immediately.

“You’re conspiring with my tech now? This is treason. What other allegiances have you corrupted?” Tony responded. He grimaced apologetically at Steve, but Steve’s expression was smooth and neutral. He waved his hand to indicate Tony should take the call, then turned around to busy himself with the dishes in the sink.

Tony cursed silently as Pepper launched into her explanation of the disastrous board meeting, information that he had never wanted less than at this moment. Shouldn’t saving the city of New York buy you at least a few months of freedom from glad-handing a bunch of millionaires who couldn’t guess the price of a screwdriver if they had three chances each? He was going to take the whole team on vacation, deep undercover on an island somewhere. Bruce could get some color that wasn’t green. Thor had gone wild for that documentary about snorkeling, and Steve could –

“Tony, are you listening to me?” Pepper demanded.

“Virginia Pepper Potts – I have no choice but to listen. You have literally extorted my attention at the hands of my own A.I. My ears are completely at your mercy, you devious tech-jacker.”

“I said we need you in L.A. tomorrow,” Pepper repeated, pointedly ignoring his interjections. “The board is threatening to pull support for the clean energy initiative if you don’t appear personally.”

Tony sighed so loudly that Steve turned back to face him, his forehead furrowed again, forming the little crease that Tony did not find so irresistible that he was currently considering how many stock options he would trade in exchange for whatever Steve had been about to say.

“Fine, Pep,” Tony conceded. “I’ll leave tonight.”

He ended the call and slid off the counter, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“I have to go to L.A.,” he told Steve. “Apparently this mutiny is a multi-front affair.”

Steve nodded, leaning back against the counter with a dishtowel thrown over one shoulder. The pain and tension were gone from his stance now, but so was whatever reckless edge had been building before the call.

“So we’re even on confessions now,” Tony continued. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t, you know, tell me more about your days as an unacknowledged bisexual icon. Or whatever.”

Steve gave him another small smile.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he acknowledged. “Thanks for the talk.”

“Any time, Steve,” Tony replied.

Steve’s eyes widened slightly and then softened.

“You too, Tony,” he said.

“I’ll text the team updates about how long it takes Pepper to strangle me with my own tie, if you want to take bets,” Tony offered. “And don’t let Barton talk everyone into air-vent laser tag. He’s been asking, and the answer is no. Not while I’m not here to kick his ass.”

“Sure, Tony. You got it,” Steve nodded. “We definitely didn’t play three rounds while you were in Tokyo last week.”

“Et tu, Brute?” Tony mock-gasped, pressing one hand to his heart. “My will is being flouted at every turn.”

“Yeah that’s my impression of you,” Steve said wryly, “that you’re a guy who finds it really hard to get what you want.”

You might be surprised, Tony thought ruefully as he turned and walked away.

“So I want to ask you a question – which you do not have to answer,” Natasha said. “But I feel like if you don’t answer, that’s kind of answering, you know?”

She and Steve were in the common room going over the footage Ward had brought them. They’d been at it for over an hour already – freezing frames, playing them backward, anything that might make something new pop out of the five-minute clip. But Steve had gotten distracted by the photo Tony had sent to the group text that morning. The picture had been taken in the foyer of the Malibu house: Tony was grinning manically, Pepper had her eyes raised to the ceiling in exasperation, and behind them loomed what appeared to be a giant stuffed rabbit.

Steve tore his eyes away from his phone to see that Natasha was observing him, lips quirked and one eyebrow slightly raised.

“Spit it out, Nat.”

“How long have you been in love with Stark?”

“That obvious, huh?” Steve replied.

“You’ve been staring at that photo for ten minutes,” she pointed out. “You look like you’re about to start doodling new initials in your sketchbook.”

“You can watch me and watch that footage at the same time?”

She shot him a look that could have withered every plant in a two-mile radius.

“Fair enough,” Steve grinned.

“So what are you doing about it?” Natasha asked, returning to the footage but propping her feet up on Steve’s lap. “What’s your strategy?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d doodle some new initials in my sketchbook.”

“Steve.” Natasha rolled her eyes, kicking at his thigh with one foot.

“Is this an interrogation?”

“Trust me, if this were an interrogation, you would have no idea. And it’s sweet of you to think I’d need one to figure this out. No, Steve. This is an intervention. We all want this to work out for you kids – especially because all the mooning around is driving everyone nuts.”

“Everyone?” Steve winced.

“Last week the two of you teased each other about shirt sizes for twenty minutes in the middle of movie night. I’m 95% sure you had forgotten the rest of us were even in the room until Thor smashed the popcorn bowl on the floor to celebrate the explosion of the Death Star. So out with it, Rogers. What’s the plan to put us all out of our misery?”

“Seriously, Nat. I don’t really have a plan. I can’t exactly pull him aside after a team meeting and say, ‘Tony, I know you just broke up with the woman who may be the love of your life, but I fell for you almost the first day I met you, so would you like to go steady?’”

He ran one hand through his hair in frustration, and Natasha shifted slightly back toward the footage, giving him space but maintaining contact through the slight pressure of her feet on his lap.

Steve wasn’t surprised she had noticed. Hell, he’d practically spelled it out for Tony the other night in the kitchen. If his reaction to one little touch on the cheek hadn’t been obvious enough, the line about brunettes might as well have been skywriting. But then Tony had gotten the call from Pepper, and Steve had remembered all the reasons why Tony was probably looking for ways to let him down easy. If Tony had been ready to move on, he could have dated anyone he wanted. Whereas Steve –

“I don’t have a great track record here,” he admitted. “Seems like I’m always giving up too easily or waiting too long. But I don’t even know if Tony thinks of me that way. I mean sometimes I think he might be interested –”

“Steve,” Natasha said seriously, gripping his hand.

“I know, trust me. I know it’s crazy –”

“No, Steve,” she repeated, pointing toward the screen.

Steve turned to look where she was indicating. For a moment he didn’t notice anything but the same clutter they’d been pouring over for hours. Then he saw it: on one corner of the dressing table was a small metal circle he had initially taken for a coaster or a paperweight. Raised on its surface, grainy but undeniable, was the outline of a skull and tentacles.

“That’s impossible,” Steve said.

But even as he spoke, the pieces were falling horribly into place: the leak at SHIELD, Harrison telling him to turn off his comms, the bad intel during their extraction missions, the Mandarin disguise, even Rumlow’s behavior on the Lemurian Star – and most of all, the nagging feeling that he was missing something he should recognize.

The team was facing some shadowy “they,” Tony had said. And hadn’t HYDRA gotten its start by hiding inside more public organizations?

Steve met Natasha’s gaze and knew from the small pinch around her eyes that she was coming to the same conclusion.

“How many people?” he asked. “How long?”

She shook her head.

“I knew something was off, but I didn’t –” Her mouth twisted in frustration. “I didn’t catch it.”

“Nat, this isn’t your fault.”

“That’s bullshit, Steve, and you know it.”

Steve did know what she meant. It was how they worked in the field: he took the brunt of the frontal assaults while she watched his back to catch the knife between the shoulder blades. And it wasn’t just Steve. It had seemed natural to all of them to trust Natasha to be the eyes in the back of their heads. But there was no way she could have seen this coming. Steve was the only one who knew what HYDRA looked like up close – the only one who could have identified the creeping sensation they sent up the spine.

He didn’t have a chance to tell her so, because just then an alert sounded from both of their SHIELD communicators.

Natasha’s feet slipped gracefully to the floor as her posture shifted from lounge to crouch. Steve pulled the device out of his pocket, already moving toward where he had left his shield resting against the wall. But when he saw the code on the display, he froze.

“Code Black,” Natasha said faintly. “That’s –”

She broke off and pressed a button on the remote. On the television screen, the footage of the Mandarin’s dressing room was replaced by a CNN news feed. Video was looping of an incident downtown D.C.: a black SUV surrounded by men in uniform; a barrage of gunfire; police cars giving chase; and finally an explosion that flipped the battered SUV onto its roof. With a horrible lurch, Steve recognized the man barely visible through the broken window of the car as Nick Fury.

“Unidentified Suspect Dead After Resisting Arrest,” the chyron read.

Natasha’s hand was still clutching the remote, hovering suspended in the air where she had changed the television display. Watching its stillness against the backdrop of the frenetic movement on screen, Steve felt like the order of operations on which he had built his new life was hanging in the balance too. Everything he had done since waking up seemed to be tottering on its base as he watched the car flip over and over again onto the concrete.

He had to call it – they couldn’t just sit here. He tried to pull his thoughts together, feeling as if he were dragging them up from a great depth. From the looks of it, the attack had happened over an hour ago. Why had it taken them so long to get the code? Was something happening at SHIELD headquarters? No one without SHIELD intel could have located Fury outside of work. Was it possible that this new HYDRA cell could be so well organized?

His sluggish train of thought was interrupted by the sounds of AC/DC blasting from his cell phone. It was Tony’s ring tone – the song he had programmed as his call sign after Steve told him it sounded like cats falling down a metal staircase. Hearing it now, Steve felt like he might collapse with relief.

“Tony,” Steve said immediately as he swiped to take the call, “We’re watching it right now. The footage –”

He stopped mid-sentence, his throat closing off on his next words, because he could hear crying on the other end of the line, and it wasn’t Tony.

“Steve,” Pepper managed, her voice shaking almost too hard to be understood, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t find a phone. Someone came… Tony got me out.”

“Pepper, what’s wrong?” Steve asked, fighting to keep his voice calm. Natasha jerked toward him, her expression going tight and hard. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” she replied with a sob. “The armor – he got me out. Search and rescue just came, and they found his phone. But Steve. The whole house is gone. God. He was still inside, and he tried to call the armor back, but I don’t know – I don’t know if he made it.”

Natasha had changed the channel again, and Steve’s head turned inexorably toward the second news report, as if someone else had gripped his jaw and was forcing him toward the display. He knew what he was going to see, and he couldn’t bear to see it. He needed to see it.

There, on the screen, helicopters were firing on Tony’s house. Bullets shattered the windows, missiles hewed giant chunks off the cliff foundations, and then the whole house was plummeting into the ocean.

Tony was inside the house, and the house was gone.

Steve shut his eyes against the sudden blaze of pain tearing through his chest, but the view his mind supplied was no better. Agent Harrison was stretched out limp on the floor of the helicopter, except it was Bucky on an exam table; it was Tony crushed by water and twisted metal. Tony, whose hands were so deft and gentle as they cupped Steve’s chin, was falling off the train, and Steve was never there in time –

“Pepper, you have to get somewhere safe,” Steve found himself saying. He could feel the ice floes now, and he allowed himself one deep breath as the cold inside him rose to cover the howling agony. “Find Happy or Rhodey and go somewhere that no one would associate with you. Do not trust anyone from SHIELD until you hear from me again. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she replied, her voice stronger. “But Tony –”

“I’m going to take care of it,” Steve said, all the feelings that could slip past the ice concentrated into that one promise. “Tony is a fighter, Pepper, and if there’s any way – I’m going to get him back.”

He hung up the phone. There would be time later to feel the fear about what state Tony would be in when Steve found him – right now he had to find him. He turned toward Natasha, who was standing in readiness, rotating a knife that had materialized in her hands.

“The two attacks must have been almost simultaneous,” she said grimly. “But no word from Hill, or from anyone at H.Q., for over an hour. Whoever ordered the hits is doing something to slow down our response.”

Steve had just opened his mouth to reply when a new, high-pitched beeping joined the sounds of the television and the alert still pinging from their comms. Both of them turned to look for its source and saw that the metal disc containing Ward’s footage had started flashing red.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Steve groaned.

In the next instant he was lunging for his shield, and Natasha was running in his direction. He started toward the kitchen island, knowing she would anticipate his movements, and she leapt into his arms right before he jumped. They twisted together in the air, Steve bringing his shield around to cover her as they landed on the other side of the counter. He barely got the shield into place before the room exploded.

Chapter Text

When the smoke cleared and the ringing in his ears stopped, the first thing Steve could hear was JARVIS.

“Captain Rogers, please respond,” the smooth voice was saying. “Do you and Agent Romanov require medical assistance?”

Steve sat up carefully, shifting Natasha’s weight so that her head stayed cradled in the crook of his left arm.

“Nat?” he asked, using his free hand to push her hair gently away from her face so he could check the cut slicing diagonally toward her left ear.

She groaned, and Steve’s chest felt suddenly tight. The wound didn’t look terribly deep, but what if she had a concussion? There could be internal injuries that would take hours to show up. Could they even risk going to SHIELD medical – or to an ordinary hospital for that matter – if HYDRA was impersonating cops in broad daylight?

Natasha reached up to take his hand, which had gone tense as it hovered at the side of her head, and gave it a squeeze.

“I’m going to kill that legacy-admissions, knock-off-Kennedy piece of shit,” she swore.

Steve let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“Nothing serious,” she assured him. “Just got knocked around a little.” She was sitting up now, already surveying the remains of the common room for additional threats. Normally, Steve would try to insist on a medical exam, but until they could figure out who to trust at SHIELD calling in their location could put them in even worse danger.

“We’re okay, JARVIS,” Steve decided.

He let Natasha move slowly to her feet before he got up to take in the scene: the charred husk of the couch, the twisted hunk that had been Tony’s flat-screen television, three smoldering chairs still being doused by the automatic sprinklers, and a gaping hole where the coffee table had been. Steve felt bile rising sharply in his throat as he realized HYDRA had violated two of Tony’s homes – two places where he was supposed to be safe.

“How bad is the damage?” Natasha asked. “Anyone else hit?”

“Damage was contained to this floor, and the rest of the building is being evacuated,” JARVIS responded. “I have alerted Agent Barton, who was already on his way back to the Tower after receiving the code from SHIELD. Dr. Banner and Thor are en route from the lab. I believe that Dr. Banner is –”

But Steve could see immediately what Dr. Banner was, because just then he came careening up the stairs at the end of the hallway, Thor right behind him. Bruce was looking a little too close to Thor’s height, and he had gone ominously green around the neck, which was probably why Thor was repeating the lines Natasha had developed to calm the Hulk in the field. Unfortunately, some of Natasha’s soothing effect seemed to be getting lost in Thor’s energetic delivery.

“The sun’s going down…sun’s getting real low!” he boomed, rubbing vigorously at Bruce’s shoulders as the doctor slid to a halt.

On seeing the blood on Natasha’s face, Bruce let out a growl that sounded distinctly Hulk-y, his whole face going green in a flash. Natasha made her way toward him, speaking calmly as she approached.

“I’m okay, big guy,” she promised. “Steve and I are both okay, but we need the Doc right now to figure this out. So deep breaths.” She reached out slowly and took one of his hands in hers, running her thumb rhythmically against his palm. The green receded slowly from Bruce’s face as he followed her breathing.

“Tony,” he managed finally, now returned mostly to his human shade.

“We saw the news of the cowardly attacks on Stark and the Director,” Thor said, clapping his hand so firmly on Bruce’s shoulder that Bruce wobbled in place.

“We don’t have confirmation of their status,” Steve said, stacking the words like mental weights against a door he couldn’t afford to open. “First priority is gathering our forces and conducting search and rescue.”

As if on cue, the elevator pinged, and Clint emerged. His gait was loose, but his eyes were sharp as they scanned his four teammates for signs of wear and tear. His gaze lingered for a moment on Natasha, who gave him a tight nod as he approached.

“I ran bioscans on each floor as I came up,” he told them. “We’re alone for now. But if that blast was supposed to take us out, it won’t take long for whoever ordered the hit to figure out it didn’t work.”

“This was too lightweight,” Natasha shook her head. “They sent military-grade equipment to take out two men alone and could only manage the digital equivalent of a homemade pipe bomb for five sixths of the Avengers? They’re either stalling us or sending some kind of warning.”

“Where did the blast come from?” Bruce asked, frowning at the scorched radius stretching out from the living room toward the kitchen and bar.

“It was the disc with the Mandarin footage,” Steve answered. “And unfortunately, the fact that it’s now turned the coffee table into a crater isn’t our only problem. Because right before the alert came through, Nat and I noticed something on ‘the Mandarin’s’ table that looked a hell of a lot like the HYDRA insignia.”

“HYDRA?” Bruce wondered. “Like from the 40s?”

“But you defeated their leader in mighty battle,” Thor said to Steve, his brow furrowed. “The legends say that you foiled their plot for domination.”

“Apparently not,” Steve replied, the bitter taste of it washing over his tongue.

“They slipped by all our networks,” Natasha pointed out. “I gathered intel for decades and never heard the name.”

“Ward brought us that disc,” Clint said sharply. “Does that mean –”

“That Grant Ward is an agent of HYDRA.”

All five of them whirled toward the source of the unexpected sound. Because those words had been spoken by a voice Steve hadn’t heard since he stood in the command center of the helicarrier. They had been spoken by a voice he’d thought he would never hear again. An impossible voice.

The voice of Phil Coulson, who was walking casually into the kitchen.

Clint swayed visibly enough that Natasha caught his arm. Her own face had gone very still and pale, the red line of blood on her cheek standing out in stark contrast to the set line of her jaw.

“Hey guys,” Coulson said, the faintest of movements playing around his lips. “Sorry for the dramatic entrance. But my new ride has cloaking technology, and you were really teeing me up there.”

“You bastard,” Clint breathed. “You absolute bastard. I thought – You let me think –”

His voice cut off abruptly, and he turned to brace himself against an intact section of the kitchen counter, his chest rising and falling heavily.

“I am truly sorry for that part,” Coulson replied more softly. “I was dead. And then I wasn’t. It took me a long time to figure out what happened in between. Fury ordered me not to tell the Avengers, and I thought he must have his reasons. I know now that the secrecy was a mistake. I trusted the system, and the people who trusted me paid a price.”

Clint’s head had dropped forward toward his chest as Coulson spoke. Natasha kept her grip on his arm, squeezing hard enough that her knuckles had gone white. Coulson’s posture hadn’t shifted, and he was still regarding them all as calmly as when he had entered, but Steve noticed that his eyes tended to move back toward Clint with some frequency.

“HYDRA?” Natasha asked.

“They’re everywhere,” Coulson confirmed grimly. “There are incursions at the Triskelion, the Academy, the Hub. I started flying to New York as soon as I heard.”

“We have to find out what happened in the other attacks. We need to know if there’s any chance Tony – if they’re still alive,” Steve said, unable to dislodge the urgency of that thought even in the face of the hundred questions raised by HYDRA’s resurgence and Coulson’s reappearance.

“Fury is alive,” Coulson replied. “And I have very good reason to believe that Stark is too. Or at least he was twenty minutes ago, when Agent Hill received a phone call offering to make a trade for his life.”

Steve’s heart did a horrible flip-flop in his chest, his stomach churning with a mixture of hope and terror.

“What trade?” he demanded.

“For months now my team has been tracking an initiative called Project Centipede,” Coulson continued, “Even before we knew they were HYDRA, we knew they wanted this.”

He pulled a USB drive out of his jacket pocket and placed it on the kitchen island.

“It’s everything we have on Project TAHITI, including the formula for GH 325, a regenerative drug made from Kree blood. I supervised the project in its trial stages, though that was one of the memories SHIELD deleted after I died. Fury wanted TAHITI as a way to revive a fallen Avenger; but in the end he had to settle for resurrecting some sap who took a magic scepter to the heart.”

Clint looked up finally and locked eyes with Coulson. His muscles were tensed, his weight forward on the balls of his feet, a stance Steve recognized from watching hours of post-battle footage: the last moment of balance before Clint decided whether to jump.

After a long moment, he rolled his shoulders back into an indolent slouch.

“If they knew that drive existed, why not steal it?” he asked, any trace of agitation gone from his voice. “Why not take it by force?”

Coulson must have understood some additional message in Clint’s movement, because he too relaxed marginally, unclasping his arms and letting them fall lightly on the edge of the island.

“That gets a bit complicated,” he responded. “You’ve probably guessed that it was my team you worked with on the Jersey and Toronto missions. Fury called us in for that job because I had the only mid-level SHIELD agents with access to the TAHITI project. Unfortunately, one of those mid-level agents was Grant Ward. And judging by the data trail Skye just discovered, it seems that Ward has been funneling all our intel to a HYDRA agent named John Garrett. Garrett was in the inner circle at SHIELD himself, so he knew they would need the retinal scan of a Level-10 agent to decode any files as classified as the ones on TAHITI. And he also he knew that Nick Fury is a terribly hard man to sneak up on. So they invented the Mandarin to keep SHIELD looking for a terrorist instead of a coup.”

“But why attack Tony?” Steve wondered. “He isn’t even a part of SHIELD. He didn’t know any more about TAHITI than we did.”

“I didn’t know the answer to that question until Hill told me about HYDRA’s demands,” Coulson replied, and something had shifted in his voice in a way that sent a shiver of warning up Steve’s spine. “They want you to be the one who brings them Fury and the files.”

“Why not just come after me then?”

“Because of why they want it to be you,” Coulson explained. “You see, Project Centipede has been having a problem – it’s why they’re after the formula for GH 325. They’ve developed a new serum, but the people they inject with it keep exploding.”

“Let me guess? Super soldiers,” Steve grimaced. An idea was taking shape in his mind, and he found himself giving words to it almost against his will, even as another part of his mind was twisting desperately away from the realization. “That’s why they want me: as a back up. If the TAHITI drug doesn’t work, they can try making something with my blood. But they knew I would never let them take me alive to extract it unless –”

He looked down at his fists, trying to breathe through the roaring sound in his ears.

“Skye didn’t find the footage that Ward brought you,” Coulson confirmed gently. “I think he probably leaked it on Garrett’s orders to get access to you –”

“To figure out how to motivate me,” Steve broke in, each word feeling like a rock against his throat.

With horrible precision, Steve’s memory conjured the moment Ward had caught him watching Tony – that sharp edge Steve had seen in his gaze. Ward had realized how Steve felt, and they had hurt Tony to get to Steve. The burst glass and the collapsed house with Tony trapped inside: it had all been because of Steve.

“What do they want me to do?” he asked.

“They gave Hill a location,” Coulson answered, “and they want you to bring the files and the Director – no one else. They gave you four hours.”

“I have to go.”

Steve fought a wave of vertigo, feeling suddenly like he was standing in a muddy tent on the front, staring down Colonel Phillips over another map of what HYDRA had taken from him. He had to grit his teeth to push the scene back, and he found himself grabbing onto the image of Tony opening his eyes on the streets of New York – that one perfect moment when Tony breathed in again.

“I won’t bring them Fury,” Steve continued, “Coulson, whether you give me the files or not is up to you. But I’m going.”

Steve knew there was no way to be sure he wasn’t handing over the keys to a weapon of mass destruction, but it didn’t matter. He looked around at his team, his expression hard and desperate, willing them to understand: I made the sacrifice call once. I ordered you to close the portal. I can’t do it again – I’m not that strong.

“Captain.” Steve felt Thor’s strong hand settle on his shoulder. “If Stark is alive, he knows you will come for him. We will not leave our friend behind.”

“You’re going to need a crash course in how to work an interrogation,” Natasha nodded. “Tony’s a pro at this, and if you can provide enough of a distraction, he’ll get free.”

“I have a biological tracker I’ve been working on,” Bruce put in, “undetectable unless you know what you’re looking for. We can use it to follow you.”

“Ward thinks I bought his line about taking Garrett to the Fridge,” Coulson added. “So they won’t be expecting my team to show up as back-up.”

“And then we kick some HYDRA ass,” Clint grinned.

Steve swallowed past the lump in his throat, trying to give his team an acknowledging smile.

“All right,” he said grimly. “We’ve got four hours to turn me into HYDRA bait before I have to rendez-vous. Let’s get to work.”

When Steve woke up hours later, it was to a hand gripping his hair, yanking his head backward.

In the initial moments of disorientation, his body gave him few clues as to how long it had been since he’d arrived at the meeting place Hill arranged with HYDRA. Agent Sitwell had been the one sent to meet him, and he hadn’t been happy that Steve had come without Fury. For a moment, Steve had thought the whole arrangement was going to fall apart right there, and he had started calculating how valuable Sitwell might be to HYDRA if he had to try to negotiate a new one.

But finally, after extended phone arguments with someone Steve assumed must be John Garrett, Sitwell had taken the TAHITI files and told Steve to get into the back of the town car. Once inside, Steve had been instructed to handcuff himself and drink the vial of liquid attached to the side door. Steve had counted on being knocked out one way or the other before the journey to HYDRA headquarters, and he had drained the glass tube without hesitating.

Whatever the drug had been, it was still making him groggy as he woke up to the fist tangled in his hair. He could hear a muffled shout of protest coming from a few feet away, and he jerked instinctively toward the familiar voice before he felt something metal jammed into his nose.

“I’d stay very still if I were you, Captain Rogers,” said another voice Steve recognized as Sitwell’s. And then Steve gasped as something stung sharply up his nasal cavity and into his skull. The hand holding his hair disengaged, and Steve was able to sit forward, taking in the room: Sitwell, backing away from him, Rumlow, leering at him from the opposite wall, Ward, clenching his jaw and gripping the holster of his gun, and Tony, tied to a metal chair, duct tape over his mouth and a large gash over his left eye.

Steve surged upward at the sight but found himself bound tightly into place. They had strapped him to an old dentist’s chair, bolted to the ground and too heavy to topple.

He took a deep steadying breath. Tony was alive. They had hurt him, but he was alive. And Steve had to keep him that way. He tried to catch Tony’s eye to communicate this determination, but Tony’s gaze was fixed on Steve’s nose, where Steve could feel a small trickle of blood moving toward his lips.

“I’m here and I brought the files you asked for,” Steve said evenly. “So let Stark go, and we can do this the easy way.”

Rumlow chuckled, and Tony gave Steve a small shake of his head – whether to say, “I’m fine” or “stop being so dramatic,” Steve couldn’t tell.

“How easy this will be is entirely in your hands, Captain Rogers,” said a new voice, and a middle-aged man Steve didn’t recognize came into view. John Garrett, Steve supposed, as he took in the intense gaze and the wild grin playing around his lips.

“You brought us the drive, but you left out the Director. Just a little oversight I’m sure. But you know only a Level-10 SHIELD agent is authorized to decode these files. So you’re going to tell us where to find one,” Garrett explained. “The longer it takes you to remember that information, the more difficult things will be.”

He gave a nod to Ward, who drew his gun and pointed it at Tony’s left leg. Steve fought the urge to lurch against the bindings again, knowing he needed to save his strength for the right moments, but he couldn’t stop himself from grinding out a curse.

“Don’t you dare touch him, you slimy piece of shit.”

“Language, Captain,” Garrett smiled. “What kind of an example does that set for America’s youth? Rumlow and Ward here will be as gentle as you like – or as inventive. It’s all up to you.”

He walked out of the room, signaling to Sitwell to follow him. Rumlow moved out of Steve’s line of vision, running his mouth as soon as the door closed.

“I could say this isn’t personal, Rogers, but to tell you the truth I asked for this assignment.”

Steve heard the sound of wheels clacking along the floor, and when Rumlow came back into view he was pushing a cart holding a set of tools and a deep metal tub. Tony’s eyes widened, and he leaned backward slightly in his chair.

“Water’s not normally my style,” Rumlow mused, “but luckily SHIELD has been gathering very helpful information for us. So we know all about what the Ten Rings did to your little boyfriend. Did you hear about that? I’m happy to refresh your memory.”

“Big man, Rumlow,” Steve spat out, “I always knew you were sloppy in the field, but I’m glad to see you’re a coward too.”

Rumlow’s grin slipped slightly.

Good, Natasha’s voice murmured in his head. Keep their attention fixed on you. The HYDRA agents hadn’t searched him carefully enough to find the small bobby pin that Fitz and Simmons had attached to the inside of his sleeve: if they run scans, it will read as a simple plastic alloy, Fitz had explained; but once activated it will start superheating whenever it comes into contact with something cooler than your body temperature, Simmons had finished. Steve was already working it into position against the strap pinning his right wrist – he just needed a little bit more time.

“You're going to tell us where to find Fury,” Ward commanded, cocking his gun and keeping it trained on Tony. “You’ve got until the count of five, and then I start shooting appendages.”

“You’re the ones who attacked him,” Steve said, allowing some of the desperation he was suppressing to creep into his voice. “The wreck was all over the news. You killed him.”

“One,” Ward counted calmly.

“It’s the truth!” Steve insisted. “I saw the crash. That’s all I know.”

“Two.” Rumlow gripped the back of Tony’s head and shoved the tub into place. Tony let out a strangled sound, and Steve didn’t have to engineer any bit of his desperation after that.

“Wait!” he gasped. The pin was heating up against his skin, and he made a small lunge against the restraints to push it into position against the strap. “Please. You have to believe me. If I could tell you, I would.”

“Three.”

Rumlow plunged Tony’s head forward into the water, and a hot wave of anger boiled over Steve. Tony was struggling against Rumlow’s fist, and Steve could hear the frantic thrash of air bubbles surfacing as if it they were rupturing inside his own chest. It took every ounce of will he possessed not to try to fight his way out of the restraints by brute force.

“STOP!” he yelled, using another lurch forward to shove the pin deeper against the strap. He felt it start to give and pulled back before Ward or Rumlow could notice. “Okay. Okay. I’ll tell you anything – please! Just let him up.”

Rumlow yanked Tony’s head backward, and he came up spluttering and gasping. Steve could feel his own muscles constricting in agony and rage, but he forced himself to concentrate his reaction into a controlled jerk of his right arm, which snapped the restraint on his bicep without revealing his free wrist.

“It’s going to be okay, Tony,” he promised, trying to will some calm into his voice as Tony heaved air back into his lungs. “I’m going to tell them.” Tony shook his head violently, trying to shout something behind the tape that sounded suspiciously like, “shut up, you idiot,” but Steve pressed on. He looked back and forth between Rumlow and Ward, trying to hold their gaze. “I know where Fury is, and I can take you to him. But you’ve got to let Tony go first. Let him go, and I’ll take you right to the Director. You have my word.”

“Don’t fuck around, Rogers. Four,” Ward warned, and Rumlow’s hand twitched threateningly back toward the back of Tony’s head.

“Fine!” Steve snapped, making a show of sagging in the chair. “Please. I’ll tell you. Ward, I’ll tell you, because the message comes from Coulson.” He held his breath and watched the aim of Ward’s gun shift ever so slightly.

“Coulson’s dead,” Ward retorted sharply.

“You and I both know that’s not true,” Steve said. “Because you betrayed him and your team.”

“What’s going on?” Rumlow groused, but Steve could see Ward’s jaw clench.

“You betrayed them all, including Skye.” Ward’s hand gave a visible twitch. “And she wanted me to tell you: she knows you’re HYDRA. She knows you killed Victoria Hand. And she hates your fucking guts.”

Ward snapped the gun toward Steve, and Steve moved. Using the leverage of his one free arm, he rolled to the left and used the momentum to rip the restraints off his right leg and then his chest. He let himself fall off the left side of the chair just as the gun fired and debris exploded from the space where his right shoulder had been. Steve reached up to secure a hand- and foothold on the side of the chair, and then shoved as hard as he could. He felt the remaining restraints snap just as something sharp stung his left calf.

He could hear Ward and Rumlow cursing, and he knew he couldn’t give them time to realize they could still use Tony for leverage. Reaching for a tray of implements on the table beside him, he whipped it at Ward’s face and followed it with a flying tackle, colliding hard enough to knock the gun out of his hand. Ward struck back, forcing Steve to fend off quick jabs to the throat and ribs.

Rumlow drew his gun and started to move toward the struggle, but Tony lunged forward with his own, suddenly free right hand and – using a grip they had practiced while sparring – broke Rumlow’s wrist. Rumlow howled and dropped the gun, and Steve leveled a sharp punch at Ward’s jaw before rolling to the side to grab the firearm. Ward had stayed down after the last punch, so Steve trained the gun on Rumlow as he moved slowly to collect the other weapon.

“Hands on your head, Rumlow,” he snapped, all the fury he had had to contain during the interrogation flooding into his voice. He tucked Ward’s gun into the holster on his belt. “If you move a fucking muscle, I will put your face through the wall. I’m taking Tony, and we’re getting out of here.”

He was about to make good on his promise when an alarm started blaring over the loud speakers. Either the team had arrived, or some HYDRA agent had finally noticed the sounds of Steve’s escape.

Steve moved quickly to put himself between Tony and the door, but before he could get to work on Tony’s restraints an agonizing pressure hammered through his skull. The pain was so sudden that Steve stumbled and dropped to one knee, his hands coming up to grip the sides of his head.

“Steve!” Tony shouted, and some part of Steve’s mind not being squeezed in a vice realized that Tony must have removed the duct tape with his free hand, which was now gripping Steve’s left arm.

“Sorry to ruin the daring rescue, Cap.” Steve wrenched his head up to see that Rumlow’s grin had turned feral. “Did you forget about our little insurance policy?”

Steve gritted his teeth and forced his arm upward to level the gun at Rumlow again, but he was suddenly tackled from the left by Ward. He lost his grip on the gun as he went down, Ward landing a punch strong enough to knock the wind out of him. Steve struck back, but a stab of pain behind one eye hit him so hard he curled inward. He felt Rumlow haul him up by one shoulder, and a kick caught him square across the jaw.

“Get the fuck off him, you goddamn cowards!” Tony was swearing up a storm as Ward and Rumlow took turns landing blows, and Steve could hear the sounds of Tony working to finish freeing himself from the chair. It wouldn’t be long before he jumped into the fight. Steve just needed ten good seconds.

Exaggerating the protective curl of his body, Steve let his mind go cold and quiet under the pain as he timed the rhythms of Ward and Rumlow’s hits: kick, kick, hook, pause, kick, kick – now. Steve grabbed Rumlow’s fist as it descended, twisted, and hauled it backward, using the momentum to break the arm, pull Rumlow’s throat forward, and slam it into his waiting elbow. In almost the same motion he rolled Rumlow’s body toward Ward’s incoming kick. Ward was momentarily thrown off balance when his foot landed sooner than expected, and Steve used the opportunity to grab the gun he had tucked into his holster. Rumlow was trying to strike back at him now with his unbroken arm, so Steve slammed the butt of the gun into the back of his head, dropping him.

He snapped the gun back toward Ward, only to watch him crumple to the ground as Tony hit him squarely on the temple with the pliers from the cart.

“Jesus Christ,” Tony breathed, lunging toward Steve and rolling Rumlow the rest of the way off of him. “You fucking idiot.”

“Tony,” Steve managed, ignoring the screaming protest in his head and torso as he lurched into a sitting position so he could scan Tony’s face. He traced one thumb shakily over Tony’s temple, just next to the angry gash across his eyebrow. Tony squeezed his eyes shut as if in pain.

“I’m sorry,” Steve gasped. “God, Tony, I’m so sorry.”

“You should be sorry, you asshole. Coming in here with no plan except to throw yourself in front of everything.”

Tony’s voice was rough with anger, but his hands were gentle as they ran over Steve’s body, looking for injuries. He plucked the bobby pin away from the charred sleeve and burnt skin at Steve’s wrist. Then he made his way down to the sharp pain in his calf.

“You’ve been shot,” he announced. “Do you think you could go one goddamn mission without getting shot?”

Steve wanted nothing more than to relax into Tony’s touch, letting him soothe the aches and stings the way he had in the kitchen that night, but another jagged pulse in his skull reminded him they were on the clock.

“That’s nothing. We need to get out of here.”

Steve hauled himself upward, ignoring a new string of profanities from Tony, who moved quickly to brace Steve's shoulder and hold him upright. Steve ran his eyes quickly around the room. Luckily, HYDRA’s hideout was not up to code, because the overhead lighting was connected to a circuit breaker through cables of exposed wiring. Steve gestured toward the wall.

“How fast could you rig those up to electrocute me?”

“You did not just ask me that, Rogers, I swear to God –”

“Tony! How fast?”

“30 seconds.”

“Do it. Tony! Listen to me.” He clenched his jaw around a fresh wave of agony. “We just need enough of a current to fry the explosive without cooking my brain. The device could blow any second, and then I won’t be able to get you out.”

“Get me out?! Get yourself out, you bastard –” Tony tried to interject, but Steve kept talking over him determinedly.

“We’re both going to get out. You’re going to shock me, you’ll short out the chip, and then you’ll bring me back.”

“Oh yeah, no big deal, I’ll just kill you and bring you right back!” Tony yelled. But his gaze was steady, and then he was moving, already ripping wires from the wall and positioning them in the metal tub of water. “I cannot fucking believe you are making me do this.”

“I know you can, Tony,” Steve said firmly, arranging himself on the chair next to the cart. He pulled off one of his gloves and put it between his teeth to stop himself from biting his tongue when the current hit, and then he let Tony position his bare hand carefully in the tub.

“I’m still going to be really pissed about this when you survive,” Tony ground out, moving into place at the circuit breaker without taking his eyes off Steve.

Steve nodded, leaning back against the chair until –

“Wait!” he shouted around the glove before removing it from his mouth.

He needed just one moment. His skull was pounding, but the sight of Tony – vibrating with energy, pinched with suppressed fear, but warm and pissed off and alive – was like coming up for air. Since he’d seen the footage from Malibu, Steve had been aching to see Tony’s chest rise and fall, to see the glow of the arc reactor that meant his heart was beating. The need had been so strong that Steve had barely been able to acknowledge it; and though he hadn’t let himself work out the odds, he knew this could be his last view. Maybe that’s why what came out of his mouth was:

“I love you.”

Tony’s hand fell off the switch, one of the few clumsy things Steve had ever seen him do.

“You – what? What the fuck, Steve!” he exploded. “You can’t say shit like that when I’m about to kill you! You love me? I am going to bring you back and murder you five more times, you absolute asshole –”

“Tony!” Steve gasped out, shoving the glove back in his mouth as the pressure spiked to a new intensity in his head.

“I love you too!” Tony yelled as he flipped the switch, and then all the anguish in his voice was pulsing through Steve’s body until everything went black.

Chapter Text

For the first few seconds after Steve hit the floor, Tony thought it was his own heart that had stopped.

The agony of that sight was an incalculable order of magnitude worse than anything he’d imagined when he first saw the helicopters approaching his house in Malibu. Waking up tied to a metal chair was a mere annoyance by comparison. Even realizing that his attackers were going to take out his whole house to get to him hadn’t managed to put this abduction into the top five. Tony had gotten Pepper out safely. And while he had already begun plotting the comeuppance richly deserved by anyone who had so much as threatened to hurt her, Tony had resigned himself to rolling his eyes through the perfunctory “roughing up” sessions before the goons in question made whatever mistake would eventually allow him to jury-rig his way out. Most kidnappers, after all, turned out to be less experienced with kidnapping than Tony Stark.

What Tony hadn’t counted on was the possibility that he wasn’t being held for ransom but used as bait. Of course, he had realized this was something other than a run-of-the-mill abduction when two of his kidnappers turned out to be SHIELD agents who said “Hail HYDRA” to each other without any discernable trace of irony. But then Sitwell had walked into the room, accompanied by three men carrying Steve’s unconscious body, and Tony had lost it.

The instant when Sitwell shot the explosive into Steve’s skull had felt like having the arc reactor ripped out of its socket. When Steve had dropped to his knee, the bottom of Tony’s stomach had fallen out. And in the end, all of those moments had just been a warm-up for this one: the horrible, never-ending seconds when all Tony’s muscles screamed and locked in protest because Steve was lying on the floor, eyes open, not breathing.

God, he was not breathing.

“Steve.” It felt like someone punched the name out of him, and the sound of his own desperation was enough to get Tony moving again, rushing to Steve’s side to start compressions. But just as he got his hands settled on Steve’s chest, he heard footsteps echoing down the hall.

Tony cursed, glancing rapidly around the room to consider his options. He couldn’t leave Steve exposed like this, but he had no idea how many assailants were about to come through the door. He leapt up and grabbed the cart Rumlow had used to torture him, pulling it toward them and toppling it over so that it formed a makeshift barrier in front of Steve’s head and torso. Tony adjusted the angle of the cart just slightly so that – after he grabbed Rumlow’s gun and ducked behind a nearby pillar – he could see a distorted reflection of the door in the bottom of the metal basin. By the time he was in position, Tony had formulated three possible responses depending on how outnumbered he was: shooting from cover; distraction plus frontal assault; or conditional surrender. The condition, of course, would be Steve’s life, which Tony guessed – judging by the way Ward had aimed for Steve’s shoulder and leg – HYDRA might still find valuable.

As it turned out, only three people entered the room. But one of them was Sitwell, who was clutching a small device that looked an awful lot like the remote trigger for an explosive. The plans that didn’t involve “frontal assault” got a little fuzzy at that point.

Taking a moment to estimate distances from the reflections in the tub, Tony fired one shot at the metal tray Steve had thrown at Ward and then spun in the opposite direction. As the HYDRA guards pivoted toward the clatter of the tray, Tony ducked into a crouch and picked them off with two quick squeezes of the trigger.

Sitwell’s gaze snapped toward him, and he held his hands bracingly in front of him.

“Shooting an unarmed man, Stark?” he asked. “That’s not exactly your style.”

“Unfortunately for you, you’re not unarmed,” Tony replied, gesturing toward the device in Sitwell’s hand with a jerk of the gun. “You bastards used that to kill a SHIELD agent who was practically a kid. His name was Agent Harrison. And if you were going to put an explosive in Steve Rogers’ head, you really should have put one in mine. Because that’s the only way you could have stopped me from tracking you down.”

Sitwell’s eyes had been widening gradually as Tony spoke, and he seemed momentarily frozen with indecision. Then the sounds of an explosion erupted from somewhere nearby, rattling the windows and creating what Sitwell must have thought was an opportunity. Sitwell’s free hand darted toward his hip, and Tony fired.

Almost before Sitwell was down, Tony was lurching back toward Steve. He straddled Steve’s waist, crossing his hands over Steve’s chest and heaving downward.

“Come on,” Tony begged, counting the beats as he drove his palms rapidly into Steve’s sternum. “Come on, Steve. Don’t you dare do this to me.” He was throwing all his weight into the compressions, but he could already tell it wasn’t going to be enough. Steve’s rib cage was too strong, and Tony couldn’t get enough pressure on his heart. He titled Steve’s head back, pinched his nose, and breathed into his mouth, but Steve remained motionless.

“No no no no no,” Tony whispered, compressing frantically with every syllable. “Please, Steve. Come on. Don’t do this. Don’t leave me. I can’t –”

He broke off, struggling to push back the desperation clawing at his throat. He was just about to start trying precordial thumps when, from outside the room, he heard the unmistakable sounds of Clint Barton clearing a hallway.

“Yeah, and you’ll stay down, you big ugly bastard,” Clint’s voice announced.

“Clint!” Tony yelled, his voice cracking with relief.

“Tony?” Clint came flying into the room, his eyes widening as he took in the sight of Steve’s body – no, Steve – lying on the floor.

“Barton, please tell me you brought a suit.”

Clint was across the room in a second, his hand snapping up over his shoulder, where he had strapped one of Tony’s briefcase suits to his back.

“Thank God,” Tony breathed. He popped the lid on the case and held his right hand over it, clicking a switch to deploy one of the gauntlets. “I have to restart his heart,” he tried to explain, but Clint just grabbed his shoulder and nodded firmly. Tony leaned forward over Steve’s chest to get in position.

“Come on, baby,” he whispered as he calibrated the pulse. “Come back to me.”

He shot Steve directly in the heart.

After a horrible silence that might have lasted a second or a century, Steve sat up with a rattling gasp. Tony barely had time to register the fact that he was now tucked in Steve’s lap before Steve had swept Rumlow’s gun off the ground and pointed it toward the door, his other arm curling Tony protectively toward his chest.

Tony collapsed forward in relief, his forehead falling to Steve’s shoulder, and his hands gripping Steve’s upper arms.

“Oh my God, Steve,” he managed, at the same time that Clint let out a loud, “Fuck.” Tony could hear Steve’s pulse thundering against his temple, and it was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard. He pressed deeper into it, retracting the gauntlet so that he could dig his fingers into the warmth of Steve’s arms. If he held on tight enough, he couldn’t feel how hard his hands were shaking.  

Steve must have gotten a signal from Clint, because his muscles slowly relaxed. Tony heard him set the gun back down, and then his hand moved up to the nape of Tony’s neck, where his thumb swept gently back and forth across Tony’s skin.

“Are you okay?” Steve asked softly.

Tony let out a sound that could have been the start of a sob or a hysterical laugh.

“Am I okay?” he repeated, pulling back so he could take in Steve’s face. Steve’s eyes were filled with concern, and Tony’s chest tightened, knowing he was never going to forget what those eyes had looked like with nothing behind them. “No I am not okay, Steve. I just electrocuted you. First you told me you loved me, and then I stopped your goddamn heart.”

Steve winced, and his hand dropped from Tony’s neck, hovering over the place on his chest where Tony had shocked him.

“Okay, well, that’s me tapping out then,” Clint announced. “Trust the two of you to finally figure this out in the middle of a HYDRA facility. I owe fifty bucks to the betting pool, by the way, and I’m probably going to steal it from the team take-out fund.”

“There is no team take-out fund, Barton. Now get lost,” Tony said.

“If you didn’t want us to use corporate money to get tacos, you shouldn’t have hired Nat as your personal assistant,” Clint pointed out sagely. “Which reminds me: celebratory margaritas are on you tonight, and I think Coulson and his team are joining.”

“Coulson?” Tony spluttered, finally tearing his eyes off Steve to gape at Clint. “Coulson’s alive?! What the fuck.”

“I know,” Clint nodded.

“But he fully let us think – I threw a goddamn memorial service! I sent a very rare antique car to a cellist!”

“I know.”

“I’m going to kill him.”

“You can get in line,” Clint muttered. Then he threw them both a mock salute. “Good luck, kids. And remember: margarita time waits for no man. Don’t make me send May to collect you.”

“So,” Tony murmured, turning back to Steve after Clint had gone, “Speaking of people who have been hiding things. I think we were discussing the rather dramatic revelation that you love me.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said with a sigh. “I know it was selfish of me to tell you that way. I shouldn’t have pressured you to say – I know you can’t feel the same way. But it doesn’t have to change anything. I mean, I can’t change how I feel, but I hope we can still be friends –”

“Oh shut up, Rogers,” Tony growled. And then he tightened his grip on Steve’s arms and hauled him into a kiss.

Steve went momentarily still with surprise, and then he was kissing back greedily, one arm wrapping around Tony’s waist and sliding up the small of his back as he pulled Tony in tighter. Tony brought his hands up to the sides of Steve’s face, clinging onto the heat returning to his cheeks. He tilted Steve’s chin so that he could part his lips, and Steve rushed upward to meet him, his fingers weaving through the still-damp waves of Tony’s hair.

Tony was almost lost in the haze of kissing Steve Rogers – the half-desperation, half-relief inspired by the sharp pant of Steve’s breath against his lips – when he felt Steve wince. Tony pulled back immediately, and Steve chased after Tony’s retreating mouth with a noise of frustration.

“You’re hurt,” Tony insisted, holding Steve gently at bay and trying not to smile at the look of impatience on his face.

“I heal really fast,” Steve assured him, as if this were an unanswerable point.

“You were technically dead five minutes ago,” Tony noted.

“I was technically dead for seventy years,” Steve retorted. “And I’ve been wanting to do this for almost as long as I’ve been alive again.”

“Well, see, let’s return to that,” Tony agreed, tracing the outline of Steve’s cheekbones with his thumbs. “That information is very relevant to my interests. But I am going to have to insist on a medical exam first, Steve. I’m not a young man, and if I have to watch you collapse for a third time today, someone’s probably going to have to restart my heart.”

Tony paused, watching the little furrow form on Steve’s forehead as Tony’s “reference the heart problem” ploy had its intended effect.

“Plus,” he added, “I think some of these HYDRA thugs are only temporarily disabled, and as much fun as it would be to see you follow through on your threat to put Rumlow’s face through a wall, I know how you get when your team’s been hurt.”

“You’re one to talk,” Steve smiled wryly. “I see you found time to get in a firefight while I was out.”

“Wasn’t much of a fight,” Tony replied grimly. His fists clenched at the thought of Sitwell activating the device, the agony on Steve’s face as the explosive charged against his brain stem, the way his body had convulsed when Tony had thrown the switch that almost killed him –

“Tony,” Steve said, pulling him out of the memory by cupping his chin gently with one hand. “It’s okay. I’m okay. You brought me back.”

The trust in Steve’s eyes was almost too much for Tony to take in. His throat tightened around any of the words he could have said in return, so instead he leaned forward and kissed Steve again, slowly and deliberately this time, as if he could make every press of his lips into a promise: I always will.

“Hey.”

They turned to see May standing in the doorway, giving them a look that managed to express both a total lack of interest and the possibility of their imminent demise.

“Barton says that if you don’t quit making out and get on the bus, he gets to put a margarita maker where the TV used to be.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Tony muttered, rolling his eyes. “Tell Barton he can shove – wait a minute, what happened to my TV?!”

“I can’t believe HYDRA blew up my TV,” Tony said sorrowfully.

After Simmons had given Steve the all-clear, the team had opted to have “celebratory margaritas” at the Tower, in spite of the near-total destruction of the common room. Steve suspected the other Avengers had agreed to the idea for the same reason Steve had suggested it: they wanted to be home together.

Coulson’s team had joined them for the first round (and then the second and third), and Steve had spent most of the evening watching quietly from one of the pieces of assorted furniture he and Thor had carried out from their bedrooms. Skye and Clint had designed a version of “margarita pong” that integrated the shrapnel strewn across the kitchen, and they were facing off against Natasha and May. It was hard to tell who was winning or losing, but it was very clear which team was drunker. Coulson and Thor were swapping stories about Asgardian adventures on Earth, and every once in a while Coulson would pause to let Thor make a toast with the large brass planter he was using as a beer stein. Simmons and Bruce seemed to have gotten halfway through a unified theory of something called “gravitonium” and were drawing equations energetically on what remained of an end table. Tony and Fitz had gone down to Tony’s workshop, and it wasn’t until they reemerged, gesticulating and talking eagerly over top of each other, that Steve realized his muscles had been tense the entire time Tony had been out of sight.

Maybe Tony had felt something similar, because as soon as he and Fitz returned to the common room, his eyes had searched for Steve.

“But if you could train a monkey to replace the reactors,” Fitz was saying.

“What? Boy Genius, you’re killing me with this monkey,” Tony responded. “You built a set of automated forensic drones in your dorm room and you’re coming to me with monkeys. Coulson, I’m hiring your team.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” Coulson replied evenly.

“Think it over, Agent,” Tony said. “SHIELD’s going to be in shambles for a while. And even without the whole ‘oops, some of us are Nazis’ thing, my benefits package is much better than Fury’s.”

“That’s true,” Natasha piped up from the middle of what had seemed like an entirely separate conversation.

“It’s really creepy when she does that,” Coulson observed. “And my team makes their own decisions, Stark. But SHIELD isn’t done with me yet. I’ve made messes I need to clean up.”

“Seems like you all come as a package deal,” Tony reflected, his eyes softening as he glanced to where Fitz had drifted back toward Simmons. “I can understand that.”

Then Tony had made his way toward the couch where Steve sat, and something had clicked back into place. Steve could breathe freely again.

They were alone now, surveying the sedimentary damage done by the bomb and the margarita night. The rest of the team had gone off to bed a few minutes ago – a planned retreat, Steve would guess, judging by the glare Natasha had given Clint when he tried to linger over the last of the queso dip. Tony was standing in front of the remains of his flat-screen TV, surrounded by scorched carpet and discarded Solo cups, but his eyes were warm, and the glow of the arc reactor was just visible through his tee-shirt, and Steve had never found any sight more stunning.

“I love you,” Steve told him, smiling at how easily the words came this time.

Tony turned, surprise flashing across his face again. And that wouldn’t do, so Steve pulled Tony gently toward him. Tony relaxed into his chest with a sigh, wrapping his arms around Steve’s waist as Steve nestled Tony’s head against his chin. He traced his fingers lightly across the back of Tony’s neck and into his hair, breathing in the smell of coconut from his shampoo, the hint of motor oil that meant he’d been checking on the bots when he visited the workshop.

They stayed like that for a long moment, Tony’s arms gradually tightening as he pressed his forehead against Steve’s shoulder. Then Tony pulled back, his eyes moving rapidly across Steve’s face. He laid one hand over Steve’s heart, and something like a shiver passed over his features.

“This is terrifying,” he admitted.

Steve nodded, tracing one finger across the fresh bandage on Tony’s forehead.

“When they took you, I felt like part of me had been ripped out,” he said. “For a while – after Bucky fell – I didn’t think I could stand to love someone that much again. That’s why I left, after New York. When you went through that portal, I knew I was getting in deep and fast, so I tried to bolt. You could have let me, and then who knows how long it would have taken me to put myself back together. But luckily for me, you never learned how to walk away from a losing battle.”

“Yeah, well, we have that in common,” Tony pointed out. “If I remember correctly, you just walked willingly into a trap set by your mortal enemies – an organization that cursed your name for most of the twentieth century – armed with nothing but a hot bobby pin. So I guess we’ve got ‘near-suicidal stubbornness’ going for us.” 

“Us, huh?” Steve asked softly. He let his hands fall to Tony’s hips, sketching little circles across the skin just above his jeans.

Tony answered by grabbing a fistful of Steve’s shirt and pulling him into a kiss. It was open and hungry in a way that had Steve pressing forward, holding tighter to Tony’s waist as they tangled together.

“Steve Rogers,” Tony said when they finally came up for air, “I love you so much that underground networks full of literal Nazis couldn’t drag me away. Which means I’m probably going to do something very stupid – scratch that, somethings very stupid – like secretly build defibrillators into all your uniforms. Or buy the company that makes those dumb khakis you wear and run it into the ground.”

“I saw the PowerPoint, Tony,” Steve smirked. “I bought two more pairs after that meeting just to let you know how much of an impression you made with that, ‘Dockers: A Human Tragedy’ slide.”

“You mock, but it should be considered, like, high treason to put Captain America’s ass in off-the-rack pants,” Tony argued, letting one hand run down Steve’s backside to illustrate his point.

“Why should I bother about that now that I’ll get to look at your pants anytime I want?” Steve countered reasonably. “Save the artistry for a real work of art.”

“I knew it!” Tony said triumphantly. “I knew you were looking. My pants radar is never wrong.”

“Tony,” Steve said, feeling a grin break out on his face, “you said you loved me.”

“Of course I do, Steve,” Tony replied simply. “You’re the best man I know. And now I don’t want to be too forward,” he gave a small squeeze with the hand that was resting on Steve’s ass, “given your old-fashioned sensibilities –”

Steve cut Tony off by lifting him easily off the ground, holding his weight with one hand under his thigh and one at his back until Tony wrapped his legs around Steve’s waist.

“All right, good, challenge accepted. This bodes extremely well for the success of my seduction strategies,” Tony said in a rush, pressing quick kisses along Steve’s jaw as Steve walked them toward his bedroom. “God, you could just toss me like a Frisbee, couldn’t you? Is it strange how hot I find that?”

“Is there anything that shuts you up?” Steve murmured with a smile, pausing in his progress to press Tony’s back against the wall of the hallway and capture his mouth in a searing kiss.

“Bet you could think of a few things to try,” Tony suggested, throwing his head back as Steve’s lips moved down his neck. “Not going to promise anything.”

“I promise I’m going to start shooting if you two don’t get a room!” Clint’s voice yelled from inside the room next to them.

“A soundproof one preferably,” Bruce put in plaintively from two doors down. “Some of us are very light sleepers.”

“But this is a wonderful event, my friends!” Thor boomed, and it sounded like he was getting ready to open his door until Natasha called out,

“Don’t you dare come out of there, Odinson. This is finally happening. And if they get spooked and go back to making puppy eyes at each other, I will personally disembowel whoever is responsible.”

Steve felt his face flush, and he leaned forward to rest his forehead on Tony’s, grinning helplessly.

“Thanks, guys,” Tony said. “Really appreciate all the support. But maybe let’s save the rest of the family feedback for the group text.”

Tony pressed a soft kiss to Steve’s lips, and Steve carried him the rest of the way down the hall, the phones in their pockets already chiming in unison.