Chapter 1
There was an explosion in the field. They thought it was just another mission, the case file followed the pattern verbatim. Some smart guy has problems with people, discovers something new in his field, and decides that he is smarter than all of humanity, so he wants them destroyed. It was getting a bit repetitive at this point, and overall it was more annoying to Tony than anything else. But when they got there, Cap was the first one who realized what the guy was going to do. They hadn’t been able to stop him.
The canister had looked like a campbell's chicken noodle soup can but JARVIS said that whatever it contained, if it went off, would encompass all of New York. Again, another plan that proved the guy a rookie. It felt more like a field trip and an excuse for Thor to test out his strength against the guy’s henchmen robots. Boy were they wrong.
In Steve’s file there is a report of one specific day during his basic training. It came to mind as Tony searched for him after the explosion. He’d read his file dozens of times after he’d been thawed out. Even heard this story from Aunt Peg. It was the day Steve figured out how to get the flag at the top of the pole. When the commanding officer had been talking to Erskine and had thrown a grenade. Peggy had watched some of the toughest men she knew, those who had no trouble keeping pace with her and her training, cower and seek shelter at the mention of the bomb. But not Steve. No, the great Captain, all 120 pounds of him, had thrown himself at the grenade, yelling for others to get back. He hadn’t even seen it as a test.
It came to no surprise then that when he saw the silver canister being thrown into the air that he threw himself at it. Tony had JARVIS record all their battles so that they could pick through certain moments at the end, discuss strategies and the like. Watching Cap leap for the bomb was not something Tony felt like rewatching. Or even watching the first time.
There was smoke and debris from around the Captain, but for some reason the blast had been more localized than what JARVIS had calculated and this stumped Tony until he saw what had happened. It made him sick, searching for what he was hoping was not the remains, but very much the breathing body of their team leader. Everyone else was too far away, battling off the self replicating robots as best they could. Tony was the only one close enough.
The bots were done in classes. The really shiny ones released noxious gas when taken down. The slightly bigger ones, with thicker arms, acted like clubs and had more force. The smaller, more human like ones, with rotatable arm joints and leg joints were far more agile and harder to catch. Their bodies looked like trash cans and their heads reminded Tony of R2D2.
Clint was on the roof, or a roof doing fancy arrow tricks while Nat was doing a lot of hand to hand with the more agile silvery freaks. Thor was the only one fighting the brutish ones because while Hulk had strength, he was the only one resistant to the noxious gas.
What he saw made him falter in his flight. There was a crater and scattered fabric mixed with the shrapnel and debris. There was also a lot of blood. But what made Tony stop was the small, naked body with a blue facemask smothering his head. The rest of the suit had been blown away or scorched off by the explosion and left a small boy broken and bruised, laying in the spot where there had been Captain America. As he made his way closer, he saw the child was lying in the fetal position, covered only by his shield. At this point, Tony was assuming it was Steve, the evidence was astounding.
“Guys, I think we have a problem. I’m taking him back to the tower. Be back in a jiff. I’ll need Banner on this. You’ll have to make due without us for a while.” He gently picked him up, making sure his suit didn’t so any more damage, though he assumed the boy had internal injuries. If this really was Captain Spandex he probably wouldn’t want Tony referring to him as a boy.
“Understood Stark. We shouldn’t be too much longer. Hulk’s been taking ‘em out by the dozen. I give it an hour, two tops. Take care of Rogers.” Romanov’s voice resounded through the coms in his suit, not sounding the least bit winded. He counted that as a good thing, if this fight didn’t even wind her, he gave them less than an hour. He didn’t even have to call Rhodey.