Chapter 10
Steve hadn’t seen these cards before. He remembered the photo shoot they used, the long day dressed in the uncomfortable wool costume he wore on stage, bright, white lights flooding his newly enhanced eyes as he posed and postured according to some random directions being yelled at him from the darkness beyond. He hated it but had said nothing as one of his handlers, someone from Senator Brandts’ office, had slapped him on the shoulder and assured him they were terrific and would help the war effort. Steve had nodded, but privately had rolled his eyes and moved on to the next project they had him trot out for, and hadn’t thought of it again. It had been just one of many “dancing monkey” sort of projects that hadn’t meant a thing to him.
But to Phil Coulson, it meant the world. Now his blood stained the fading and browning paper. He’d been so pleased that it only had “light foxing” on it, which Steve could only assume was a good thing. The thick, sticky gore covered the lower half of the pictures, the evidence of Coulson’s sacrifice. Steve had promised to sign those for him when it was all over.
It was an old-fashioned idea…
Fury’s words rang uncomfortably in Steve’s mind as he set the card aside on the glass-topped table. Say what you want, Fury was a good showman, and he knew the things that would needle him and Stark - appeal to the need to protect people from threats too big for any one of them to handle. It was something they both shared, albeit for different reasons, and that failure to see eye-to-eye on that despite their differences led to this man’s death. It wasn’t a subtle message, but Steve got it. As for Stark…well, perhaps he got it a little too well. He’d marched off without a look for any of them, angry and defiant, Peggy trailing after him, perhaps to talk sense into him.
Fury watched them march off with a dry eye, before wandering to the far side of the table, casting his baleful gaze on Steve. “Your team seems to be falling apart, Cap.”
“My team?” Steve posed the question as more of a statement, leaning back in his high-backed chair. He supposed it had been assumed from the beginning that he’d lead the team, much as he had the Howling Commandos before, but never once had he thought of it in those terms. “I think you have made a lot of assumptions about what this team is and who they answer to Director Fury, and that is part of the problem.”
Even in the short time he had known him, Steve had learned that Fury rarely ever gave anything away. Spies so rarely did, but to Steve’s satisfaction, his words caught Fury by surprise, a flicker of annoyance crossing his scared face. He stood to his full height - only slightly taller than Steve’s own now - his expression darkening. “You got a problem with how this ship has been run, Captain?”
He reminded Steve of Philips in the moment, and now as he had then he found himself squaring his shoulders, his chin lifting as he met Fury’s singular glare. “I do when good men get killed. Say what you want about us not getting our act together, sir, but be honest here. You say you brought us on board to be the heroes to protect the world when no one else could, and yet you got a cargo hold full of HYDRA-style weapons ready to do the job as a failsafe? You have an initiative to bring us all together, hoping we would work, but it sure looks as if you didn’t expect it to. You have no direction, no plan, and no real reason for this team to be together, and yet somehow you scold us for it. So I want to know, if this was your great gamble, then why did you act as if we were going to fail?”
Fury did not like hearing that. Beyond him, Hill stood, eyes wide as they flickered with uncertainty to the back of Fury’s bald head, aware that her boss wasn’t the type who usually had anyone call him out on the carpet. Well, it wasn’t the first time Steve had pissed off a superior officer, and he had never apologized for it before. He wasn’t particularly inclined to start now.
Fury’s lone eye blinked for a long moment before he moved to lean on the back of the chair like a predator considering whether to toy with his prey or take it out of its misery. “You know, I read in your SSR file that for all your talk of duty, you had an insubordinate streak, Rogers.”
Steve shrugged. “I was never one for keeping my mouth shut if I saw something wrong. Doing anything less got men killed.”
It was a stab at him regarding Coulson, and it hit. Far from feeling exultant, Steve saw the pain that caused, and the weight it placed on Fury’s shoulders. Coulson had been one of his top men, and he suspected there was a long history between Fury and Coulson. Every leader felt that loss keenly, or should at the very least, and Fury did. “Perhaps I was arrogant enough to believe that somehow this would all work, bringing together a team of superheroes who were perfect strangers to one another. That was my fault. I’d hoped that between you, Carter, and Stark you’d be able to put aside the petty bullshit and do what was needed to get this done. I own that I forced the idea and thought it would somehow magically succeed if I willed it enough, but I also own I wasn’t taking any chances with it either and didn’t give any of you a clear direction on what it was I wanted or we needed. For that, yeah, I’m sorry. I haven’t treated this like it was your team or anyone’s, save a weapon I could pull out and aim at an enemy when needed. So, sure, I’ll take responsibility for that.”
He could admit he was wrong, then. It spoke volumes to Steve about Fury’s character and he found he respected him more for it. “I own I’ve been flailing in the middle of all of this, trying to find some steady ground and coming up with nothing.” He glanced down at the bloody cards in front of him, pictures of a man far more confident and noble than he felt at the moment. “Coulson died thinking I was some hero cooked up by Senator Brandt and his team to sell war bonds. I don’t know who you thought I was, but I am just a kid from Brooklyn, way out of his time and out of his depth, trying to figure this all out.”
Fury studied him for long moments before picking out Steve’s words in a drawl. “Just a kid from Brooklyn.” He rolled those words over in a resonant voice, something about him amusing him, causing him to snort and shake his dark head. “The greatest soldier of World War II and you believe that bullshit, that you aren’t a hero? That sure as hell wasn’t what your peers believed in the war. It’s not what Howard Stark believed, and it wasn’t what Carter believed, either, if you ever asked her. And it sure as hell wasn’t what Coulson died believing. So what, some serum made you taller and stronger, some ad man in New York created the idea of ‘Captain America’? That’s not what people look to you for. They looked to you, Rogers, because you are a leader, who cuts through the petty bullshit and sees people for who they are, not who they want you to think they are. You made a team out of soldiers no one else would have put on a front line, because you saw what was good in them and believed in them without question, and you led them to do what was right, not what was easy. No matter what Stark said about test tubes and bottles, the shit that made you a hero was always who you were before you ever shot yourself up. Erskine saw that. Carter knows that. Maybe you should start accepting that, too, because that’s the hero we need out there right now, Cap. That’s the hero Coulson believed in, anyway, that little guy from Brooklyn who dared to spit in Johan Schmidt’s eye.”
Fury had read him far more than Steve gave him credit for.
“You know,” Fury sighed, straightening again. “When Carter appeared on our doorstep and I laid out this crazy plan about the Avengers to her, one of the first things she said was this team would need you. No one else in this group would have the clarity of purpose and strength of conviction to do it. We didn’t spend millions of dollars to pull you out of the ice as a publicity stunt. You’ve seen these guys in person now, Rogers, and sure, they’re all heroes. But Carter is right, they need someone like you to remind them what this is all for, what the purpose is here, to ground it down to earth. This isn’t just about ego, honor, or getting a job done for SHIELD so we will leave them alone, all of humanity is at stake here. If there is anyone who gets that, it’s you. You know how to make them work together and believe in that purpose. That’s what you do. That’s why they are your team.”
He never spoke more than a normal volume, but Fury’s words reverberated as he stoically turned away, meandering to Hill with her status report. She eyed Steve, quietly, before launching into it, and he knew that he was being quietly dismissed. Fury was leaving him to sort this mess out in the only way Steve knew how. Silently, he rose to wander in the direction both Stark and Peggy left in. If he was going to somehow fix this, he needed to take the biggest bull by the horns.
He found Peggy in the stairwell, climbing slowly up the stairs, pensive in a painfully thoughtful way that he hated seeing. Whatever her conversation was with Stark, it didn’t look good.
“I was looking for Stark, actually” he explained, sensing something raw and tender had opened up in their conversation that Peggy was wrestling with. “Wanted to check in with him.”
Peggy’s dark eyes flickered downward. “I think he’s in the detention level.”
The site of their failure. That made sense. “How is he taking it?”
Steve suspected he knew the answer to that question given Stark’s performance earlier, but Peggy looked vaguely surprised by it. “Hard.”
“Were they good friends?”
“Not especially,” she admitted. “Stark doesn’t have many of those. Coulson worked with Stark Industries a lot, he was friends with Pepper Potts, Stark’s…well, girlfriend, but the CEO of his company.”
Steve seemed to remember in the mire of information thrown at him in recent weeks that there had been mention of Stark having a committed relationship with someone, something that surprised Steve given how his father had carried on during the war. “Has he lost anyone in the line doing this?”
“No, not like this.” She sighed, wearily, wincing as a hand brushed across the stitches that still lay angry and red along her scalp. “Not like we have.”
He blinked and for a moment he was clinging to the side of a train, desperate fingers reaching for his best friend, just inches away from him. The metal railing Bucky clung to screeched and groaned as it pulled away from the train, Bucky’s outstretched hand falling from his grasp as his scream echoed through the valley, undampened by the snow as he fell towards the towering trees and icy river below…
A deep inhale, a small shake, a deep exhale, and he was back, standing in the stairwell of a flying aircraft carrier, his friend gone now for decades. Yeah, he knew something about losing people in the line.
“Yeah, let me talk to him, maybe we can salvage something, make it work.”
“Maybe,” she returned, sounding less than certain. “I need to check in with people on the ground.”
Steve would much rather she sit somewhere, safe and sound, and put ice on the angry wound that kept drawing his eyes to her dark hair. Peggy could take care of herself, but damn if he didn't wish she would once in a while. She was too stubborn by half, which was probably why he was so crazy about her. But he didn’t stop her, choosing instead to gently move past her, she to her duties, he to his. He had a team to pull together after all.
Just as Peggy had suspected, Steve found Stark on the detention level, in the room that had once housed Loki’s cell. That was gone now, jettisoned with Thor in it somewhere over Long Island, and Steve could only hope that wherever it landed it was somewhere away from people and that Thor had managed to survive it.
Stark stood in the space in silence, staring at the spot of their failure - an empty space, and a dark, blood-stained spot on the wall. The air was thick with everything the other man was feeling; regret, guilt, anger, frustration. It was a small surprise to Steve that Stark wasn’t closer to Coulson, given his reaction. He leaned against one of the struts inside the space, studying Stark where he stood, hands in his pockets, staring into the spot where Coulson fell as if trying to burn a hole through it and wipe it all away.
“Was he married?” It was more a shot in the dark, a riff off of the earlier conversation he had heard Stark and Coulson have when they came up on the bridge about love and giving it a chance. A widowed wife might explain some of Stark’s angst at the moment, given his history of loss.
Stark turned, startled out of his pensiveness. “No, there was a cellist, I think.”
This much grief for someone he barely knew. “I’m sorry. He must have been a good man.”
“He was an idiot,” Stark snapped darkly, giving into the cold frustration he’d displayed since he stepped foot back on the bridge.
“Why,” Steve pressed. “For believing?”
“For taking Loki on alone,” Stark retorted, short and annoyed.
“He was doing his job.”
“He was out of his league,” Stark shot back, a statement which would have been arrogant if it wasn’t true. “He should have waited, he should have…”
Stark trailed off, guilt and sadness bleeding into the silence. Steve knew that space well and remembered feeling it countless times, but specifically after Bucky’s death. He’d been angry then, so angry - at Bucky for picking up his shield and trying to defend him, at the faceless HYDRA agent for firing at him, at Zola for insisting that he fire, but most of all at himself for not getting up faster, for getting his ass knocked down, allowing the hole to be blasted in the train and Bucky to be hit out in the first place. As Peggy was quick to note, however, when she found him drinking in that pub, it hadn’t been his fault. And this wasn’t Stark’s, either.
“Sometimes there isn’t a way out, Tony,” he reminded the other man, quietly.
It wasn’t what Stark wanted to hear. “Right! How did that work for you?”
It was a low blow, a clear sign that Stark was over this conversation, as was the fact he turned on his heels to walk away. Had he been anyone else, Steve likely would have left it at that and let him cool his temper, but they didn’t have the time or the luxury for Stark’s sulking. “Is this the first time you lost a soldier?”
Steve knew the moment he said those words that he’d done wrong, but too late. He braced himself as Stark turned, expression livid as he marched back, as if ready to throw down with Steve right there, suit or no suit.
“We are not soldiers,” he snarled, punctuating each word with a finger in Steve’s face. “I’m not marching to Fury’s fife!”
So that was it! Something about Fury in all of this, pulling them all together as his weapon, that was what was sticking in Stark’s craw. The epiphany sparked, hitting on Steve’s misgivings, on the accusations he had tossed at Fury’s feet upstairs. Stark was most afraid of powerful weapons getting into the hands of those who would abuse the privilege, and there was no more powerful weapon in Stark’s arsenal than himself. His belligerence and his unwillingness to play ball made sense, and it clicked satisfyingly into Steve’s understanding of the situation.
“Neither am I,” Steve returned, meeting Stark’s anger. “He’s got the same blood on his hands as Loki does. Right now, we got to put that aside and get this done. Now Loki needs a power source. If we can put together a list…”
Stark had already seemingly checked out, his gaze returning to the stain on the wall, but he paused, something about it causing the other man to still, a thoughtful expression on his face, before cutting Steve off. “He made it personal.”
That part Steve was well aware of. “That’s not the point.”
“That is the point,” he insisted, as gears began to spin behind his dark eyes, faster than Steve could comprehend. For a moment it was like staring straight at a ghost, as he was reminded of Howard’s quicksilver intellect, except frighteningly more intuitive. “That is Loki’s point. He hits us all right where we live. Why?”
That part was obvious. “To tear us apart.”
Stark nodded, already processing, rambling as he wandered, throwing ideas out between them, as they began to piece the puzzle together. “He had to conquer his greed, but he knows he needs to take us out to win, right? He wants to beat us, and he wants to be seen doing it. He wants an audience.”
It all tracked, as Steve rolled his eyes, recalling Asgardian’s dramatics earlier. “Right, I caught his act in Stuttgart.”
“Yeah, that’s just a preview, this is opening night!!” Excitement sounded as Tony made his way to the nearby platform, as if it were a stage, standing on it as if he were taking Loki’s place in the spotlight. “Loki is a full-tilt diva. He wants flowers, he wants parades, he wants a tower built to the skies with his name on it…”
Here Stark paused for a long moment as it clicked into place.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” He flushed, hopping off the platform, and rushing for the door.
“Stark,” Steve called, pulling him back before he could, knowing that if he didn’t the other man would simply keep rocketing off in his forward momentum without stopping to think strategically about any of it. “Where’s he at?”
His smirk was both exasperated and embarrassed. “Isn’t it obvious? ‘A light shining to the world’ he had said. He practically told me what he was doing, only I wasn’t picking up all of what he was laying down. Stark Tower is run off an arc reactor, Cap, endless energy, enough to power up his portal device.”
There was a funny irony in all of it. “A tower built to the sky with his name on it?”
Strangely, even Stark seemed to find a dark humor in this. “Well, they say that to know your enemy you have to think like him, right?”
“Right,” Steve chuffed, already piecing together a plan. “What shape is your suit in?”
“Rought,” he admitted, calculating. “I can maybe get it going enough to get me there, but I don’t know if I can do much more than that. I have a suit in the lab, but it’s a prototype, and hasn’t been tested for combat yet.”
“Do you think it would work?”
Stark exhaled, rifling through mental calculations. “I can have JARVIS keep it prepped just in case, but I wouldn’t be able to hold him on my own, not with any confidence.”
“Do that! See if you can get your suit going and get ahead of us and stall him. Meanwhile, I’ll round up whoever else is left and we will meet you there.”
“Right!” Stark moved for the door, Steve at his heels. “Who do you got?”
“Romanoff, me, she might know of someone else we can press into this.”
“That’s not much,” Stark returned, side-eyeing him with sharp concern.
“It’s what we got for now. Maybe with luck, Thor will find us again.”
“Hate to tell you this, Cap, but luck hasn’t been on our side today.”
“Well, there’s always a first,” Steve returned and felt himself smiling at the banter. This felt familiar, this he knew, the thrill of adrenaline in his veins, the sense of purpose as he calculated what they would need to do, how they would need to work. “You trust me, Stark?”
He wasn’t sure that Stark did, but for what it was worth, Stark stopped, staring at Steve intently before holding out his hand to him. “I do.”
“Good,” Steve nodded, taking Stark’s hand firmly and shaking it. “I’ll have your back out there, no matter what.”
“And if we fail miserably at this?”
“I’ll still have your back.”
“Well, it’s something.” Stark returned with a hint of his biting humor. “Not much, but it’s something.”