Chapter 4
With a cup of warm tea in his hands to persuade Natasha, Steve steps cautiously into the dimly lit gym at the heart of SHIELD. He’s getting marginally better at navigating the imposingly dull grey corridors to get where he needs to be, so he’s a few minutes early and gratified to see Natasha already in the midst of warming up. Clint isn’t anywhere to be seen, but that’s perhaps for the better if Steve wants to get his confusion about Edward’s well-being out of his head.
Waiting for her to finish her set of stretches, Steve clears his throat before he starts approaching her, mindful to give her enough warning of his approach. He knows she likely noticed his presence despite her back turned towards him, but he doesn’t want to take chances with all the skills and abilities listed in her file.
“Hi,” Steve eventually greets, holding out the cup. Natasha turns around to face him. She cocks an eyebrow, obviously seeing through him.
“What did you do, Steve?”
The playful accusation stings for how similar it sounds to how Bucky and Morita used to say it, fond and exasperated all at once, and Steve swallows to keep the memories at bay.
“I, uh, brought you tea?”
“Sure,” she smirks, taking the cup and taking a light sip from it. The curve of her lips turns softer as she tastes it, Steve having unconsciously memorised her order. “What else did you do?”
Steve pockets his hands uncertainly, not sure what he should do with them, and the brush of his fingers against the screen of his phone is grounding. “So, I’ve been – ”
“Captain, Agent. With me, now.”
They both whip their heads around, Fury’s commanding voice echoing through the all but deserted gym. The Director is standing with a scowl on his face, and Steve supposes Edward can wait a little bit more. He gives a questioning glance at Natasha, but she just shrugs, walking towards the door with as little clue as Steve.
Fury gives them a curt nod and leads them down the halfway, into the elevator. His coat whips about his ankle and Steve wonders how the man can manage such thick clothes indoors. He doesn’t get long to ponder, however, because Fury’s back to glaring at the both of them as soon as the elevator starts moving up.
“Someone tipped Stark off that Captain America is alive and well,” Fury growls, “something to do with an unauthorised piece of tech?”
Even with only one eye, Fury’s glare is fearsome. But Steve’s been in a war, he’s faced down Nazis, the Red Skull, and an angry Peggy Carter. Fury’s glare is nothing. So Steve smiles sweetly, “what kind of tech would it be, Director? I still haven’t fully caught up, you see.”
A barely audible snort of laughter comes from Natasha and Fury’s scowl grows. “I expected better from you, Agent.”
“Well, Director,” Natasha points out, unperturbed, “I thought it was good for his modern education.”
Fury shakes his head. “How did you even escape your apartment unnoticed long enough to buy a phone, Captain?”
It’s Steve’s turn to shrug. “I have my skills.”
Just then, the elevator dings cheerfully, doors sliding open to what Steve presumes is the entrance to Fury’s office. A retina and handprint scan later, they walk into the large space overlooking the streets of New York and Fury waves them over to the sofas.
“Sit,” he shortly commands, not bothering to sit himself, instead pacing the considerable length of the room as Steve and Natasha quietly watch. “When I took this job, nobody thought to warn me about you,” Fury mutters under his breath.
“To be fair,” Steve finds himself unable to keep quiet for long, “they thought I was dead.”
“Agent Coulson just got off the phone with Ms. Potts. Stark is coming here himself. He’s pissed.”
Those words make Steve perk up. Agent Coulson is a SHIELD agent, and his dealings with Stark Industries must be why Edward had mentioned the name. Still, that doesn’t explain why Fury’s agitated about Tony coming over. How long were they planning to keep Steve’s… return a secret for, anyway?
“He hacked the servers again?” Natasha asks, “couldn’t he settle for a phone call?”
“Apparently, he’s dusted the cobwebs off his suit and is flying here,” Fury intones, the weight of his words undecipherable to Steve. Steve’s pretty sure that a suit has the same meaning now as it did seventy years ago, but Natasha’s next words make him less certain.
“The suit? Are you sure? Didn’t he say he destroyed them all?”
“I’m sorry, what suit?” Steve finally has to ask, because this conversation is spiralling fast away from anything Steve had prepared himself to handle this morning.
“I need more than a coffee to deal with this,” Fury curses.
“Why are you all so afraid?” Steve asks, even more confused.
“Stark is richer than most countries in the world,” Natasha explains, “he isn’t CEO any longer, but his wealth and all the senators and Presidents he knows? Rumour has it, he has the Queen’s private number. He’s angry and powerful.”
“Why is he so angry?”
Neither of them answer, trading tense looks until eventually Fury stalks back to the elevator with a huff, turning around at the last second before he’s out of their sight. He pins them with his one eye, daring them to argue. “I’m getting us breakfast. Don’t you dare leave this room. And tell Barton to not step anywhere near this building. He’ll start a fight with Stark and that’s one headache I do not want to deal with.”
Natasha makes a face. She respects Fury enough to heed his words, but not so much as to fear him. “Get three extra portions for Steve!” she calls to Fury’s retreating back, and Steve’s sharp hearing picks up Fury’s muttered, “motherfucker, I run a spy agency, not a kindergarten.”
Steve clears his throat. “So.”
Natasha stands to move to the sofa opposite him, placing her half-finished cup on the small table between them. Lounging back in the sofa, she explains some more. “Stark can be arrogant, narcissistic, self-obsessed. He cares about people, but when he’s pissed, he’s an ass.”
“He sounds worlds away from the man in the videos,” Steve muses, fiddling with the pen and paper next to Natasha’s cup. The man he’s spent hours watching in the little screen of his phone is passionate about life and learning, he gives free scholarships and donates to children’s hospitals. Steve knows Tony has a shadowed past, but he can’t be the same man anymore, can he?
“He’s not a team player,” Natasha absently tells him, more preoccupied with her phone for the moment. It reminds Steve that he hasn’t asked about Edward yet, but he’s more curious about Tony and the prospect of meeting him that Steve pushes that matter aside for the moment.
Glancing out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the clear skies of the city, Steve casts around his mind for memories of Tony’s SHIELD file. “You recommended him for the Avengers.”
“I recommended Iron Man, not Tony Stark.”
That distinction doesn’t ring any bells. There wasn’t any mention of a metal man in the file. Perhaps it was in one of the entirely blacked out pages. “Iron Man?”
“You’ll see,” Natasha purses her lips, distracted, “he hasn’t quite forgiven me for that yet, because he can’t accept the truth to it. We don’t need Tony Stark, we need Tony.”
“He sounds like a complicated man.” And a fascinating one, but Steve doesn’t voice that out loud, not wanting to reveal even more of himself to Natasha’s sharp eyes and ears.
She laughs, “you don’t know the half of it.”
Tony can accept a spy in his company. He can accept them meddling with the palladium issue. He can even forgive them for their presumptions and transgressions.
He can’t, however, accept them hiding Captain goddamn America from him. Fury knows about Howard’s obsession. Hell, part of Howard’s will had stipulated a significant amount of his wealth to finding Steve fucking Rogers.
SHIELD could have had the courtesy to simply tell Tony.
Pissed is an understatement. He thought that the roar of the wind in his ears would be calming, but he’s too angry and annoyed to find any joy or comfort in flying. All his daddy issues aside, he’s also angry that they didn’t have the courtesy to tell Aunt Peggy either that they’d found the Captain, and what a load of bullshit that was.
There’s something going on in SHIELD that they’re so desperate to keep this under wraps, and Tony spent the entire night rooting out their files, digging deeper for any malevolent secret they might be hiding. He hasn’t found much, so far, even if what he has found is incriminating and enough of a leverage to get them to listen.
Tesseract experimentation, harnessing weaponizable energy – was SHIELD really that brainless?
Shooting through another sonic boom, Tony continues to fume.
The sky is beautiful, the clouds stretching out below him, and what a wonderful, wonderful day it will be for Tony to crash into SHIELD’s windows in plain sight. If they have the guts to keep Captain America under wraps, they can have the pain of keeping Iron Man under wraps too.
And with that, he hurtles into Fury’s office window.
“Get back!” Steve shouts, instinct kicking in and he grabs Natasha, pulling her behind a sofa and eyes darting everywhere for a weapon.
The red and gold monstrosity is clanging around, its heavy weight crunching and thudding over the shards of glass that were once the elegant panes of Fury’s windows. Whatever it is, Steve’s beginning to feel his grip on the future slip away again because those robotic attackers of the fictional world cannot be real can they?
Fury’s not yet back, so it’s possible for Natasha to warn him, and there must be backup in this building, right? Their mission statement is to protect against these advanced threats – the robot is coming closer, a rough crackling sound coming from it – he needs to get Natasha –
Natasha is… laughing?
“What?” Steve angrily hisses, and her laughs grow louder, she’s clutching her stomach with one hand as her other bats Steve’s away with surprising force.
She stands, revealing their position. “Always the drama queen.”
The robot turns to face her, the golden mask blank and expressionless, two blue slits as its eyes. Steve dares to stand next to Natasha, and from this angle, it’s easier to catalogue the robot. A glowing metal circle shines from his chest, and if Steve has to guess, that’s where the power comes from – light is energy, Tony has explained in his videos – and that’s therefore where the weak spot must be.
“Is that the Capsicle?” the robot speaks, now standing motionless in the middle of the room. From the openness of the smashed windows, Steve can hear the distant noise of sirens in the street below them. Good. The authorities know something is wrong here, although Natasha certainly seems unconcerned about the intruder.
“Stark, get out of there,” Natasha chides, and – Stark? Oh. Oh. Steve is so slow, he doesn’t believe it. That must be the Iron Man she was talking about, and Tony is inside it?
“No can do, Tarantula. Last time you came near me, you stabbed my neck.”
“With a needle,” Natasha rolls her eyes, more to placate Steve’s indignant gasp than to defend herself.
“How ‘bout this: you show me the Capsicle and I’ll show you my pretty face.” The robot, Tony’s?, voice sounds different, more muffled, but the words are certainly his flair. Any other time, they would have made Steve laugh.
“I prefer the term Captain.” Steve is torn between wanting to be annoyed at being called a Capsicle and amazed at the armor. It’s flashy, and he vaguely remembers Natasha warning him that Tony could come off as arrogant and narcissistic.
The helmet stays firmly closed, although the robot does turn its bright eyes towards Steve.
“Stark, calm down.”
Tony bristles at that, pushing down for a moment the swell of anger that rises in him as his curiosity gets the better of him. So this is the Steve Rogers that Howard never shut up about. This man in ridiculously plain jeans and a plaid shirt that makes him look like a prep kid despite the bulging muscles straining the thin fabric.
SHIELD found Captain America. And didn’t seem to think it was important to buy the man proper clothes.
God, the man’s eyes are as blue as Aunt Peggy had said, and the HUD lights up with pressure points and biometric analyses which highlight the Captain’s fighting stance: feet planted firmly apart, back straight, knees slightly bent. The perfect specimen.
Of course he would be as perfect as Howard repeated over and over again.
“Stark. Tony,” Romanoff calls again, the barest of frowns crinkling her skin.
Tony’s about to send her another biting remark when he spots from the corner of his eye the doors to the elevator slide open, JARVIS already hacking back into the building’s security. He’d disabled the alarms upon entry – otherwise, they’d already be surrounded by the guns of five dozen pesky, prying agents – it’s child’s play to disable the elevator.
Except. The man who walks out of it is entirely too familiar.
“Fury,” Tony grits out as soon as the man passes through the office doors. There’s a bag of what looks like takeout and a takeaway tray of coffee cups in Fury’s right hand.
Everything Tony’s seen today is making less and less sense.
“I’d appreciate it if you stepped out of that suit, Iron Man,” Fury greets back wryly.
Again, Tony bristles. “Why? You scared?”
Fury shakes his head, making a beeline to the overturned sofa behind which the Capsicle and Ms. Rushman are still hiding. “I’m billing you for the damage. Couldn’t you be less dramatic?”
That sets Tony off. “Nuh, uh, you don’t get to tell me to calm down.” Tony advances onto the three of them, armor clunking and repulsors glowing. “We had a deal, Fury. My company had a deal. I could get Pepper to sue you for negligence.”
“That was before you decided to skip off and run an underground vendetta against SHIELD.”
Steve frowns. He didn’t know that Tony was an enemy of SHIELD – he couldn’t wrap it up around his mind. From the person petting his bots to an arrogant traitor, Steve can’t figure out who this robot, this Iron Man, this Tony Stark is supposed to be
“What deal?” Steve hears his own voice cut through the air, breaking through whatever standoff Fury and Tony were having.
The metal faceplate flips up, and wow, Steve’s brain blinks for a second, because it is Tony. Whatever doubts he’d had that the metal man didn’t contain a live person is dispelled, and god, if Steve had found himself captivated by the beauty of the man inside his little phone screen, Steve now found himself falling a second, third, fourth time for the soft and sharp lines of the man’s face.
Despite the confusion warring in him, Steve can still appreciate beauty.
That feeling of awe dissipates soon enough, however, because Tony goes on to say flatly, “you’re a Stark property.”
“I – ” Steve blanches, “I’m not anyone’s property.”
“Yes, but do you know what these bastards will do when they get their hands fully on you?” Tony waves a metal hand. “They’ll turn you into a tool, they’ll use you as their propaganda. SHIELD is rotten to the core. It’s time you all see it.”
“SHIELD’s not rotten,” Natasha insists, and Steve wonders whether she truly believes it or whether SHIELD is simply the only connection she has to this life she treasures, the only connection away from the nightmare of her past.
Tony shrugs. “We believe what we need to believe. But I have promises to keep. You’re not getting Steve Rogers.”
“Well you’re not getting me either,” Steve points out because the audacity of the man – Steve isn’t an object to be owned or collected.
“Not your choice,” Tony blandly replies, a sharpness in his eyes that sends Steve’s nerves on edge. “Have they told you about the Tesseract yet?”
A coldness spread down Steve’s spine. What did that mean? What were they hiding? Steve sacrificed everything to put that cursed Cube at the bottom of the ocean, safe away from the greed of men. Whatever Tony is insinuating, it can’t possibly be true, can it?
“How did you – ” Fury starts to ask and Tony easily speaks over him, scoffing.
“It was Howard’s equipment you used to find it. Did you really think I wouldn’t know?”
The chill pools in a heavy weight, and Steve struggles to breathe. They told him the war ended and that the Alliance won. They didn’t tell him what they lost. What they did to throw away the victory.
“We had a deal: the Tesseract for the Captain’s freedom should you ever find him alive,” Tony continues to speak, faint over the buzzing in Steve’s ears.
Fury casts one swift look at Steve’s stony face. “And if the Captain has chosen of his own free will to be here?”
Tony smirks, cruel and unrelenting. “You never truly gave him freedom did you? I can bet wherever he’s living, he’s surrounded by your agents.”
He’d made that deal with SHIELD knowing full well that if they ever did too much with the Tesseract, Tony could have easily taken it from them. What was less easy was to keep the American icon safe from SHIELD’s poison. Although the evidence was frustratingly bare, Tony knew that something was going on behind the curtains.
A supersoldier in the wrong hands is dangerous.
And as much as Tony had hated Captain America all his life except for a brief period during that horrible hero worship phase, Tony had also loved the stories of Steve Rogers he’d wheedled from his Aunt.
That infuriating, skinny, loud-mouthed, stubborn troublemaker from Brooklyn? As a scrawny fourteen-year-old lost in a sea of uncaring adults, Tony had wondered what it took to stay as strong and true as Steve Rogers.
For that reason, and that reason only, Tony stands firm in front of Fury and Romanoff. The Captain is looking a bit blue around the gills too, and Tony surmises that he indeed hadn’t been told of the Tesseract.
Predictable. All the lies.
“Is it true?” The Captain’s voice is soft and loud all at once.
Fury closes his eye, his head bowed. “Yes. We have the Tesseract, and we’re studying it to understand it.”
“We believe what we need to believe,” Tony snipes again, turning slightly to look expectantly at Steve, as if already knowing Steve’s decision.
Steve gives him a small nod. The edges of Tony’s lips curl up faintly, barely there but clear to Steve’s sharp eyes. Natasha, however, seems to have noticed Steve’s choices too, and she moves to stand between Steve and Tony.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Steve?”
“I haven’t really seen the world today. What better way to immerse myself in the future than with the man who built the future?” Steve really can’t help the note of admiration that slips into his voice, and he quickly covers it up with a stern glare at Fury. “You should have left the Tesseract where you found it.”
“Captain – ”
“No,” Steve rants, “you have lied to me at every turn. You tried to lie to me from the very first second I woke up. You tried to keep my world in your control – did you really think I wouldn’t find the hidden microphones you planted all over the place? I was in the war. I worked with spies. And you want me to march to your beck and call? You better think again because I was never a perfect soldier.”
“Oh, Captain,” Tony laughs, and it sends a shard of warmth through the chilling rage bubbling in Steve, “we’re going to have so much fun.”
“And what will you do, Steve?” Natasha asks almost softly, ignoring Tony. “What will you do to fill your days?”
There’s genuine concern in her voice, the caring kindness that had made Steve consider her a friend, and Steve forgives her for her deceptions. Or he’s decided that he will. Just not right now.
He thinks of the hours he’s spent on his phone, of the scarves he used to knit in the trenches, of painting his mother’s golden curls and burning cookies with Bucky. “I’ll find something.”
“Right,” Tony clears his throat, “why don’t you try flying?”
He holds out one metal hand in their direction, the fingers waggling slightly, and Natasha finally takes a step back, shaking her head at Fury in warning.
Steve decides he’ll forgive her sooner.
“As long as we stay in the city,” Steve agrees, walking over and lacing his own fingers over the cold metal, letting his warmth seep into it. He hopes that he isn’t wrong to trust Tony. He hopes he can find an anchor in the future, away from SHIELD, away from the war that they keep fighting.
From this close, Tony’s eyes are golden in the sunlight.
The metal fingers close firmly around Steve’s, pulling him even closer to the metal armor.
“Fury, Romanoff, nice doing business with you both,” Tony grins triumphantly, and Steve can’t help but feel a giddy excitement burn away his anger and confusion.
Except.
The rumble of engines grow louder.
“Captain, do hold on.”
Their feet lift off the floor.
And Steve has a brief flash of the bright lights dotting the Coney Island rollercoaster –
He might have made a mistake –
He holds on as tight as he can.