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Steve rarely feels this awful after a fight, but then again, he hasn’t been on a solo mission in months.
It’s always a little bit easier when Clint is there to pick off an alien before it can sink its teeth and claws into Steve and when Tony has an aerial view to tell him when he’s got incoming, and afterwards, when Steve can distract himself from the discomfort of his healing factor by prattling on with the rest of the team or by busying himself playing nurse. It keeps his mind off of the eerie feeling of his cuts stitching themselves closed.
He was on his own this time though, so he didn’t have any of that, and now he’s back at the Tower, exhausted and uncomfortable and crabby.
He’s so beat that he ignores the little voice in his head chiding him for not even hitting the showers before stripping out of the top of his uniform and collapsing onto the first couch he sees. He does try to separate himself from the nice couch with the blanket he usually uses, but he decides that he’ll replace it out of his own pocket if he gets it dirty anyway. Finally, something to spend his military back pay on.
Steve lays there with his good cheek pressed to the couch and closes his eyes, trying to estimate how much longer he’ll lay here before he finally gets up and cleans himself up. He has to cover the cut on his other cheek so shampoo doesn’t get in it when he goes to rinse the grime out of his hair. There’s a mission report waiting to be typed up and he won’t be able to rely on JARVIS because he didn’t get access to a Quinjet this time, and he has to clean his uniform and stitch up the little rip he knows is on the left shoulder, and—
“Are you dead?” Clint asks from a few feet away.
“No,” Steve mumbles.
Clint doesn’t say anything back, but Steve hears him walk into the kitchen and open and close the freezer, and then he stops next to Steve when he walks back into the lounge room.
“Ice pack incoming,” Clint says, and then Steve feels something cold under his eye. It only stings for a second. “You’re starting to swell up there. They got you good, kid.”
“I’ll be fine,” Steve says, cracking his other eye open to look at Clint, who’s holding the ice pack to Steve’s face with one hand and a bag of chips in the other. Steve grimaces a little when he shifts to take over the ice pack. “Thanks for this.”
Clint ruffles Steve’s hair with his free hand and leaves him be.
Steve is sure he already had helmet hair and it’s probably worse now, but that doesn’t stop Natasha from messing it up more when she walks in a few minutes later, on the phone with Maria. Steve knows because he can hear her voice—that’s another thing about the serum. He can usually hear both sides of a phone call.
“What does that have to do with you?” Natasha is asking as she walks over to Steve and sits down on the armrest. She smells like shampoo, which reminds Steve that he really should get up and shower. Then she starts running her fingers through Steve’s hair, not seeming to mind how it’s been matted down by his helmet in some places and that there’s blood drying in his hairline. “Yeah, I know the E Wing blew up, but—”
Steve opens both his eyes at that, slightly alarmed. He didn’t hear anything about any wing of any building blowing up. But Natasha just pets him gently, as if to tell him not to worry about it. On the other end, Maria concedes that the casualty count is zero, which makes Steve feel better, and then she starts on the security risks and how she’s somehow ended up running point on installing a new system.
By the time Natasha leaves, Steve doesn’t feel very much like getting off the couch anymore. He’s getting comfortable here.
He loses track of time a little bit, not quite sleeping but not alert either, and he doesn’t know if it’s been five or fifteen minutes by the time Bruce comes through the living room. His footfall tends to be soft and he wears socks around the living quarters in the Tower, and Steve hears him chuckle before he hears his footsteps.
“Oh boy,” Bruce says. “What happened to you?”
Steve makes some noises that don’t mean anything.
Bruce takes the ice pack away, which Steve didn’t register that he’d been holding the whole time Natasha was on the phone. “This is melting. You want another one?”
Steve prods under his own eye with a knuckle, finding that the swelling has mostly gone away and it’s still a little tender, but it doesn’t hurt too much anymore. The ice probably helped to numb it. He does like how quickly his bruises go away—it’s one of the few painless sensations that come from his healing factor because he can’t feel his body reabsorbing the blood from his bruises.
He clears his throat. “I’m okay. Clint got me that.”
“Yeah, did he give you this too?” Bruce asks, patting the back of Steve’s head. “You’ve got about fifty cowlicks up here, buddy.”
Bruce talks to him for a while and it’s nice listening to his voice—it’s always calm, always warm enough to fall asleep in. He seems to know better than most what it’s like to be this exhausted because he only says things to Steve that don’t require any real response, and for a while he’s just there, patiently smoothing down Steve’s disastrous hair.
“Are you gonna be okay here?” Bruce asks finally. “Still joining us for pasta night later?”
“Yeah,” Steve says with a small smile, feeling better than he did before. He’ll even give Bruce a full sentence to prove it. “I’m hitting the shower soon.”
Steve loves pasta night. Once they all found out how easy it was to make their own pasta, there was no going back, and it really couldn’t have landed on a better day than today. Steve feels cheerier just thinking about that.
Steve really is about to get up and do what he told Bruce he was going to do, and then Tony walks in.
“That poor couch,” Tony comments, and Steve might be too hopped up on dopamine to take his bait for once. Tony shifts closer, examining Steve’s cheek, the side with the cut and what had formerly been a swollen eye. “Where’d you get that wound? Looks like they got pretty damn close to taking out your actual eye.”
“They should’ve tried harder,” Steve says, rolling his shoulders as he starts to sit up. His muscles are still a little sore, but he feels better all over.
It’s probably because he’s spent the better part of an hour doing nothing on the couch except getting the housecat treatment, and now that he’s more clear-headed, he’s starting to feel apologetic for just collapsing like that in the middle of their shared living quarters. But then again, he thinks, no one really seemed to mind that he did that.
Tony is still looking at his wounded cheek, oddly solemn.
“Why’d you even have to run that mission solo?” Tony asks. “I know you’ve been in Washington, but we were all here. Could’ve called.”
Steve really must be on a dopamine high because he isn’t even feeling argumentative right now. He took this mission by himself because it was quick and dirty, easy enough, and he was already in the area, but—
“Next time,” Steve says, and even Tony looks surprised at that. “I think doing this with the team is better than going it alone.”
“Yeah,” Tony says, and now his voice is soft. “Yeah, I think so too.” He reaches out then and brushes a strand of Steve’s hair out of his forehead, and without meaning to, Steve tilts his head up and presses into Tony’s hand. Tony clears his throat and pulls back. “Your hair’s a mess. But you knew that, right?”
Not after Bruce spent ten minutes straightening it out, Steve thinks, but he doesn’t say that. He just nods and bows his head a little, letting Tony have his turn.
“You’re coming to pasta night too, right?” Steve asks, looking up at him.
“You know me. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Steve ducks his head back down and smiles to himself.