in technicolor

“This is the worst fuckin’ idea,” JB decided with his flesh hand on Matt’s neck to keep him upright. Matt wasn’t great at being awake at the minute. He was extremely lethargic. He didn’t say a single word to Brett or even Foggy when he tried to get him to eat. He reached for Foggy’s face and when Fogs took his hands, he just pressed his forehead against his heart.

Listening. He closed his eyes and fell asleep there.

“He’ll be fine,” Sam argued when JB shook the poor guy awake lightly. “Modern medicine is incredible. Anyways, we could finally get you vaccinated Steve, someone should probably do it.”

“No, it’s not that,” JB said. “I ain’t worried ‘bout polio or that so much as I’m worried about the asthma.”

Steve made a miserable sound on the floor as though the mere memory was painful.

“The scoliosis.”

Another sob.

“The food allergies, the heart palpitations. Anemia. Partial deafness.”

“I shoulda died when I was 25,” Steve lamented.

“You shoulda died when you were twelve,” JB corrected helpfully his way. “Not to mention the second he puts that thing on, every HYDRA agent that’s ever existed is gonna crawl outta the woodwork with a knife.”

“Well, we’ll just have to protect him then,” Sam said. “This is more than just Steve, JB, you see that, right? People see Steve up there suffering, they’ll probably think twice about this shit. It’ll get people talking if nothing else. Make a huge fuss out of everything.”

“I mean, yeah,” JB conceded, “But Steve’s been consensually enhanced. Loads of these people haven’t been. That’s gotta be complicated in people’s brains. No one wants to think about that.”

Sam gave him a perfectly arched eyebrow.

“You sayin’ you should wear one, too?” he asked.

JB fell quiet, then leaned over and patted Steve on the back of his shoulder.

“I’ll protect you, pal,” he said.

“Fuck you.”

“I’m sure I got the whole list of allergies in my head somewhere. Maybe we can trigger-word it out.”

“UGH.”

People were absolutely going try to murder Cap if he went through with this, which meant that he needed some security to at least scare off the lesser wannabes. The big guys, Barnes and Sam would take care of, but in the meantime, who better to serve as eye-candy police escorts than the rogue 15^th Precinct?

Brett took Sam’s idea to the Captain who stood, reading the hastily typed request in his office doorway. He flipped the page over to check the back for additional text when he was done and then blew out a breath.

“This is not what I was thinking,” he said.

Yeah, well. Brett didn’t know what else to do right now. May Parker was right. They needed someone bigger than the bureaucracy right now. Their station in particular owed it to the vigilantes, but more importantly, they, as a city, owed it to the knowing and unknowingly enhanced people among them.

“Bad publicity might slow the roll out,” Brett said.

“Cap could be in serious danger if he lets his guard down like this.”

“And that would make him no different from any of the other people getting collared,” Brett pointed out. “That’s exactly the point. If people see the enhancement as an integral part of a person, something they can’t help, then that’ll help humanize the victims.”

The Captain cupped his chin in a hand and then sighed and shook his head.

“Cap’s gonna do what Cap’s gonna do, I guess,” he said. “I’m not convinced it’ll work, but if it shames at least a couple of the bigger proponents, then I guess that’s at least something. Making it a controversy might make it a last resort or put it back into testing.”

“Is that a ‘yes,’ sir?” Brett asked.

A long pause.

“Yeah,” The Captain said, “Yes, I think it is. Mahoney, you got four officers. Make sure the poor sap doesn’t get shot.”

Roger that.

Tony Stark, Mr. Spectacle himself, leapt at the idea and arranged a whole publicity event around Cap getting collared.

Steve was not happy. Steve could not possibly be more unhappy. He didn’t even pretend to be happy for all the news cameras crammed around the bullpen. Instead, he was busy crushing Barnes’s hand in his grip and going through breathing exercises.

Steve was convinced that he was going to have an asthma attack the second the collar went on. JB hummed amicably as though this was, in fact, a distinct possibility. Sam shushed them both and said that he was prepared for this. The station had an albuterol inhaler on hand. To this, Steve said, ‘What’s that?’ And really, that was not a great start.

There were approximately two hundred bodies too many crammed around the bullpen when Goldberg stepped out from the back with shaky hands and asked Steve to please sit in the office chair provided. Steve balled his fists and sucked it up and sat as tall and proud as he could in his full Captain America suit. Goldberg carefully folded down his suit collar and the whole room lit up with flashes and people talking into microphones as he clipped the strap into place on Steve’s neck.

He moved back.

Steve lifted his head and rolled it around to feel the collar. He made a face like, ‘well, that wasn’t so bad,’ and then proceeded to have a fucking seizure on live television.

“This is the worst,” Steve slurred about an hour later, staring up the roof of his shiny new hospital room. The good news was that he was already trending on twitter.

“The worst. It’s the worst. Hey, Sam?”

“Yes, dear?”

“It’s the worst.”

“Oh, good. Thanks. I didn’t catch that before.”

Steve’s body was confused as fuck by the halted serum effects. It seemed torn between going into overdrive and trying to shrink everything back down. The doc now overseeing his case was freaking out. He kept scurrying in with his colleagues and asking Steve if he’d had a history of something and then scrambling off to go request yet another test.

Brett imagined that it was a lot of pressure making sure a national icon didn’t fucking die in your care.

Steve didn’t make that very easy because about two hours in, he decided that he was done with hospitals and he was going to go out and live his life, as shitty and short as it apparently wanted to be. He signed out against medical advice and took the damn subway, security team and all, home.

People flocked around and stared at him, grumpily digging his fingers between his neck and the collar, and JB, discreetly trying to sanitize the handrail he held onto, for the whole ride.

Once they finally got off the train, Brett told Sam that they’d be camped out outside of the house for the night if anything happened, to which he gestured to JB with a wide arcing arm. JB watched the arm, puzzled. Brett decided that this meant that the other two felt pretty safe at the moment. He left the guys to sleep and texted Fogs.

BM: hey man, you doing okay? How’s matt?

FN: hey, we’re alright. He’s a little more awake today. Says he’s just drained is all.

BM: glad to hear it. You see the news by chance?

FN: yeah

FN: man I’m sorry I was an asshole. It’s not your fault that any of this happened, you don’t have to go through all this

BM: it’s not just for you guys Fogs. Sometimes, things are just wrong. And anyways, you can thank May Parker, she’s the one who really convinced me.

FN: aw, may.

FN: well thanks anyways man. Matty’s real emotional about it. Says he won’t let anyone fuck with your car anymore

BM: sure thing

BM: WAIT

BM: HE KNOWS WHOS BEEN FUCKING WITH MY CAR???

FN: lol yeah

BM: goddamnit matt. I’ve been paying for that shit out of pocket

FN: <3 <3 <3

Brett was surprised to come back onto guard duty the next morning to find that Wade Wilson had stormed his way into the Cap residence and was very busily pacing and calling Cap every synonym for the word ‘idiot’ he could think of. When he ran out, he started in on variations of ‘fucker.’

Wade was of the opinion that Cap was suicidal. He told him to take the collar off immediately.

“You’ve made your point,” he said, “Twitter is all about it. You got like, six elementary schools staging a walk out. But this is insane. This is me-levels of insane.”

That testimony should have been used in the publicity fliers. If Wade Wilson declared something unacceptable, it had to be up there with war crimes.

Peter snuck through the paparazzi outside Cap’s house a little later in the day and similarly pleaded with him to take it off.

“You’re gonna get sick,” he said. “What if you get bad-sick? What if you get hurt?”

Steve waved tiredly at JB and then at Sam.

“First line of defense,” he explained, “Paramedic.”

The other guys were fairly chill about it. Peter was not convinced.

“It would be better with group action,” he argued. “We could all wear them in solidarity.”

Wade reentered the house to pick Peter up and remove him from the situation entirely. That was how bad of an idea he thought the whole thing was. Brett kind of had to agree with him. It was enough of a production looking after Cap. Three people had already tried to break the house’s windows to end him and it wasn’t even lunch yet. JB had caught one of the arms when it came through and had gone out front to make an example out of him for the cameras.

There was no way the city could look after multiple known enhanced folks. Not to mention that Peter didn’t know what the collar felt like.

Steve seemed pretty fucking miserable in it, although he was putting on a good face. He kept arching his back and clearing his throat. Every so often, he rested his head against JB’s shoulder and closed his eyes to take a few shuddery breaths.

Brett couldn’t imagine what Wade would feel like with one of those things around his neck. Then he didn’t have to.

“Cancer, Spidey. Stage Four. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t move, can’t shit. Everything hurts, shit you didn’t even know could hurt, hurts. Breathing is exhausting. Opening your eyes feels like death. Is that what you want to subject me to? In solidarity? What about Red, huh? Cut off everything for him? Can’t see shit, can’t recognize any sounds anymore? It’d be like he woke up on another fuckin’ planet, kid. Think about what you’re askin’ for.”

Peter was appropriately cowed.

“I’ll wear one then,” he sniffed. “Just me. I’ll wear it in the suit. Take some pictures, post ‘em on social media.”

“You will not,” Sam snapped at him. Peter set his jaw.

“Why not?”

“We don’t know what your body’s doing right now, Peter. If you’re still healing from something, you’re gonna end up like Jones.”

“I’m not,” Peter argued. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t know that,” Wade said. Peter glared at him.

“I do.”

“Kid.”

“Pete, it’s fine,” Steve said with his eyes closed and forehead against Barnes’s metal arm. “It’s gotta be me.”

“Why? Why’s it gotta be you?” Peter demanded.

“’Cause I said so,” Steve said irritably. The backtracked. “’Cause more people know me than know you. And if you took it off and just went back to normal, that’s not gonna cause a sensation.”

Peter chewed on that furiously.

“So what? You’re gonna go out and get hit by a bus or something? Is that your plan here?” he asked.

“No,” Steve gritted out, “I’m gonna get fucking pneumonia. You just wait.”

Steve didn’t get pneumonia, bless him. That would have been too kind too soon. Instead, Brett got to watch Sam execute an Epipen with terrifying precision and efficiency in the middle of Starbucks because it turned out that Cap had a peanut allergy which he was now furious about. There was an instant replay of this at a charity thing later that afternoon, when it was discovered that he had an almond allergy too. He then decided to forsake all tree nuts and told the universe to fuck off, he was switching over to grains only.

He went out with JB and Sam to their usual running spot and resolved to take it slow with Sam for once. About one lap in, he started wheezing and gasping and clutching at his chest and everyone in the park (and their goddamn phones--so basically anyone with an internet connection) got to watch Steve look like he was having a heart attack while JB reverted back to 1930s Bucky Barnes in a matter of milliseconds. He threw his hands up over his head and kept saying, “Big arms, Stevie. Big arms.”

This, Brett learned later, was an entreaty to Steve to get his arms over his head to give his lungs more room to expand because the 1930s didn’t have albuterol. He only learned it later because Sam stood back after having attacked his man with an inhaler to watch JB herd Steve away from every stone, pebble, and minor inconvenience that he could while Steve threatened to maim him in the middle of the goddamn park.

Steve was happy to be miserable, but only on his terms. The second anyone else implied he was anything but perfectly capable and healthy, he spun around, fully determined to prove them wrong by doing exactly what would kill him.

“You know, Buck’s got these major anxiety triggers,” Sam said, watching JB physically drag Steve away from a weed nestled in the hedge which would allegedly make him break out in hives. “And I feel like I’ve finally found the root of it all.”

Steve eventually decided fuck all this, he was gonna go jump off the pier. JB informed him at full-volume that he was not. Even after all these years, it seemed that JB hadn’t learned a damn thing. Steve froze in place and stared at him dead in the eye. And then made a break straight for the park fountain.

On the upside, there was now a load of people waving signs and chanting in front of a handful of police stations throughout the city.

Steve was determined to test the absolute limits of his regained fragility and every Avenger Brett had met and many he hadn’t were suddenly extremely involved in Steve’s life. Brett had never been privy to this higher level of super-people. Standing guard over Captain America in a room full of the most capable super-people the world had ever seen (and Barton) felt a little unnecessary. Still though, it allowed him to watch Steve get pissed off at something Stark was saying and reach over to grab a granola bar to just test his luck.

The Black Widow snatched it out of his hand before he could even get the packaging open. He mugged at her hard and she gave him a warning eye which Brett was pretty sure had resulted in the deaths of multiple human beings. Steve grumbled about it.

It was decided in this meeting that part of the team would go out to investigate a concerning operation happening just behind the border in Maine. The other part was waiting for Thor, since he’d called in at 4am to say he had something which he required support with. Steve lit up and said he was great at camping.

Everyone in the room looked at him flatly and then went back to their business. Barton gave Steve a shitty drawing of his dog as a consolation prize.

Steve threw it at him.

JB woke up at the following scuffle and sat up and sniffed. He effectively separated the two of them with this feat alone.

And then Thor finally showed up and everything went to shit.

Thor, Brett now knew, was the horrible big brother figure among the Avengers. He saw Cap and Cap saw him and they both beamed at each other.

Thor had not gotten the memo regarding Steve’s new hideous accessory. He thought it was charming. He asked where he could get one. He then told Steve he had a job which he was gonna love and everyone in the room went from far too relaxed to on high alert.

Thor told Steve that they were going to go fight a sea monster and Steve had never been happier in his goddamn life. He had a head full of sea-fantasies.

“My dad was a sailor,” he bubbled to Thor. “It’s in my blood.”

JB was horrified.

“We’re not doing any of that,” he announced stiffly. Thor blinked at him. Steve stared at him like he hated him. “Steve’s immune-compromised, big guy. He ain’t going near no toxic water or krakens or none of that shit. He sure as shit ain’t doing no submarine business.”

Steve’s jaw said ‘watch me.’

Brett decided then that Sam Wilson was the strongest, most patient man he knew; he had to be to put up with these two day in and day out.

“There are no submarines,” Thor said. Then to Steve he said, “This is fine. We will lure it ashore.”

Getting Captain America to not be Captain America in the face of a potential sea monster was like trying to turn a German shepherd into a corgi. It didn’t work. Sam told Steve that he was going take the shield for this one and Steve decided that that was cool, he’d take the stealth suit. Barnes told Steve that, bummer man, he was taking the Cap stealth suit, and Steve said, aight, I’ll borrow Nat’s.

Natasha Romanova was going to break Steve’s neck in the near future, Brett was sure of it. She said that he couldn’t borrow it, A. because it was still stretched out from the last time she let one of them giant bozos touch her things and B. because Barton was wearing it.

This was news to Barton. He gaped at her and then at Steve and then at Brett like he had anything to do with this situation. He pointed from himself to Nat while staring at Brett in his bullet proof vest, and all Brett could really do was shrug.

Steve said he saw what they were all doing and that was fine, he’d just go in a t-shirt and jeans and Thor celebrated this as optimal kraken-fighting attire.

Again. Thor?

Trouble.

Thor was above-ground Wade. Thor went into any situation and made it worse. But with great enthusiasm and unprecedented expertise. Tony Stark was the one who pulled shit back to base for a fucking surprise by saying, “No. Rogers, you’re staying with Bruce. Your death will not make people drop the collars, it will just make them think you’re an idiot wearing one.”

Steve mugged at him, too. Stark gave him challenging hands.

“Where is the lie?” he demanded.

“The point,” Steve huffed, “Is to show how dangerous the collar is. What better way to do that then show how useless I am in battle with it on?”

Brett felt like this was a crazy argument. But he was not here to talk. He was here to guard.

“I got a better way,” Barnes said. “Let’s just wait two more days and when you get typhus, the job’ll be done for you.”

“Too hard to get typhus these days, Buck, I’m counting on measles,” Steve volleyed back nastily.

JB didn’t think he was funny. Barton did. The Black Widow punched him in the shoulder without looking at him and that made him stop laughing by making him clutch at his arm in pain.

“You’re not going, Rogers, I’m sorry. Go stand in traffic or something if you want to be grievously injured,” Stark said with a dismissive wave. “Everyone else, suit up.”

Brett was pretty sure that Amos would pass out if he knew that Brett had just witnessed an Avengers team break. But he couldn’t focus on that for too long because his target was moving and whispering into Thor’s ear. Thor whispered something back and Brett’s gut sank. Thor patted Cap on the back and nodded and Steve broke away from the others back towards the elevator. He looked expectantly back at Brett and the other guards.

“You coming?” he asked.

Oh god, oh no. Oh, god.

This guy was going to make himself bait for a sea monster.

“Cap, listen,” Brett negotiated on behalf of himself and the other three guards. “This is highly irresponsible.”

“Mahoney, you are talking to the wrong person if you think I have ever given a shit about being responsible.”

Brett was.

Brett was.

Brett couldn’t believe he was saying this, but he was gonna call Matt. He needed superpeople advice. Now.

“Matt,” he hissed into the phone a safe hundred or so yards away from the action, “Captain fucking America is fishing for a fucking kraken with his goddamn hands.”

There was a pause on the other side of the line.

“Doesn’t he have like, a heart condition?” Matt asked. He sounded much better than he had the other day.

“Probably,” Brett said, “But that’s not the main problem right now. How the fuck do I move someone at this level of dumb-fuck?”

Matt made a thoughtful noise and then called over his shoulder to bounce the question off Foggy. Foggy made highly concerned sounds in the background.

“Fogs thinks that you should tell Barnes exactly what he’s doing, but I think your main object here is distraction.”

Distraction? What did that mean?

“Well, he’s out to prove a point isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, so let him prove it. Or suffer the consequences, I guess.”

“Matt, I need you to talk like a real life person instead of in secrets right now,” Brett hissed, glancing behind him to where Steve looked like he was getting ready to hop off the dock at any second. “Time is of the essence.”

“Okay, okay. Where are you?”

He rattled off the location.

“Alright. Okay. Uh. Okay, I’ll be there.”

Wait, what?

“Matthew, you are one week out from a collapsed lung, you’re not going anywhere. Just tell me what to do.”

“I’m gonna fight him?”

“WHAT.”

“I mean it’s me or my ex, so?”

“SEND YOUR EX.”

“Oh, no. She’ll just kill him. Oh. Wait, don’t worry, I got this.”

He hung up and Brett was left holding his phone wondering if he was seriously going to have to tackle Captain America.

He decided to try reasoning with him first.

“Steve, if the point here is to achieve peak suffering, then you at least need an audience,” he said while the other officers stared at him in horror.

Steve considered this with both hands on the edge of the dock. He shrugged.

“It’ll get to the papers in time, it always does,” he said.

“You know, if you’re the one instigating this, you’re not going to look like a martyr,” Brett tried next.

“No, I will. Trust me.”

“What do you think Sam thinks of this, huh?”

“Sam’s not fucking me ‘cause I’m a genius. He’s only got himself to blame if he’s disappointed.”

God.

This fucking guy. Who the hell chose him to be Captain-America-fied? What the hell had Erskine been thinking?

He heard the splash before he saw it, but when he did, he was surprised. That was Matt, not Steve, standing at the edge of the dock now. All wrapped up in his black pajamas, innocently peering down into the water. Cap broke the surface shortly after, sputtering. He swore and jolted when Matt grabbed the back of his shirt and dragged him in closer.

“The hell are you doing?” he coughed. “You’ve got a bum lung.”

Matt went still, then cocked his head.

“And you’ve got two,” he said. Then half-hauled Cap up out of the water and shoved his face hard against the wood of the door. His fingers scrabbled at something behind Cap’s head and then Cap yelped and tried to grab him, but whatever it was they were fussing over, it was too late. Matt spun up into standing and gunned it down the dock. Cap threw himself out of the water and started to go charging after and it was only then that Brett realized what it was Matt had done.

He’s stolen the collar.

Sam couldn’t seem to decide if he was going to throttle Steve or congratulate him when this news was conveyed to the Avengers team who’d arrived on the scene to go investigate the kraken hunting business. Stark just started to bust a gut. Seemed like it was the funniest thing he’d heard in years.

Thor was delighted by his delight.

“The red horned one took it?” he clarified. Steve made a sad noise and mimed nothing being in his hands. JB started cackling. He had absolutely not taken the stealth suit.

“What does this mean?” Thor asked Steve who made an even sadder noise at the realization that this was now an even bigger problem than anticipated.

“I need that thing back,” he said, “I need it. Protests don’t work if people cross the fucking picket line.”

“How’d he even get it off you?” Sam asked. “It needs a code.”

“He knew the code,” Steve said dolefully.

“How could he know the code? It’s a police code, right detective?”

Indeed it was. How had Matt known the code? And why steal the collar after telling Brett he was going to fight Cap? Was there an abrupt change of plans?

“Maybe DD figured it from the tv footage or something?” JB thought out loud. “If not him, then one of his associates.”

There was a sudden pause on the Avengers team, and then everyone looked right at Stark. His eyes widened like a cat’s in realization.

“He’s not my kid,” he suddenly said. “I am not responsible for him or any of his actions.”

Oh, no.

Peter.

Steve, once again at full functioning capacity, decided that he needed to catch Matt before he handed the collar off to some other vigilante. He ran off to go do that and JB looked around wildly for a moment at his departure, and then chased after, telling him that DD wasn’t that easily caught.

“Someone needs to go with those two or they’re gonna make a scene,” The Black Widow said evenly.

Sam sighed gustily.

“I’ll do it!” Barton announced, hand held high. “Me and Red are best friends now. He tried to maim my dog last week.”

Uh.

“Alright, bye,” Natasha said. Barton fist pumped and took off after the first two.

“Nat,” Sam said slowly, “Were we trying not to make a scene or?”

“Hmm? Oh, well if there’s three of them that’s fine then, isn’t it? If it’s just Steve and James, that’s one thing, but if Barton’s in there, people will assume it’s his incompetence that got them into this mess.”

Where those two friends? Brett thought they were friends. They’d seemed like friends and partners the other week, but maybe not? Maybe the Widow secretly hated Barton?

“Hey, are we still finding the fish or nah?” Stark asked. “Detective Mahoney can take those guys from here, can’t he?”

Well. Yeah. Brett guessed that he could.

Brett strongly doubted that Matt had thought far enough ahead to have any especially solid plan, although he had apparently thought far enough ahead to get Peter to somehow figure out the collar’s code.

That was one step, but Matt’s planning skills didn’t typically go too far beyond that, which meant that he’d probably—

“WHAT THE FUCK?”

Steve held clawed hands at face-level as Peter, in full Spidey suit, swung past them all in the street lightning-fast. He did not look back. Which meant—

Matt popped up at Brett’s shoulder and gave him a damn heart attack. Steve got hands on him within seconds and literally held him up to eye level.

“Get it back,” he ordered. Matt looked very small in his enormous hands.

“But you lost it,” Matt said innocently.

“I am trying to do something here, Double D,” Steve gritted out.

“Oh. Coincidence. So are we,” Matt said cheerfully, kind of swinging his feet.

“What could you possibly be doing?” Steve demanded.

Matt beamed at him like he hadn’t been actively dying on the guy’s couch the week before. He looked beyond silly in the black pajamas in daytime. People had started to gather around the pavement to see why Captain America was shaking the shit out of the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen in the middle of the afternoon.

“Well,” Matt said good-naturedly, ignoring their audience, “The problem is that the thing is scary, right? So we figured that if we all got to handle it, it wouldn’t be so scary.”

JB started cackling again. Steve did not put Matt down. He just stared at him in disbelief.

“This does not solve the problem,” he said.

“No, and neither will you being a martyr,” Matt hummed. “If enhanced people are supposed to be treated as people, then it’s better to just sue and take it to trial. Get it in legal code rather than just in social etiquette. Social etiquette changes all the time. And until it’s made illegal, we’re just gonna see more and more of those devices popping up. The root,” he said with a finger in Steve’s face, “Is that we are not seen as people. That,” he pointed in the direction that Peter had swung in, “Is a symptom.”

Steve set him down.

“You’re kinda smart, you know that?” he said.

Matt wriggled in pleasure at the praise. Captain America praise no less. He was definitely going to lord that over Foggy.

“I have two degrees,” he said proudly.

“Yeah, I bet you do,” Steve said absently, looking off in the distance. “Where’s he taking it then?”

“Ah. To Iron Fist, I think.”

“To?”

“Touch.”

“Right. So do I get it back?”

“Dunno,” Matt said simply. “Jess might destroy it on contact. Same with Wade.”

“So, is this not my problem anymore?” Steve asked honestly. He sounded a little happy about it.

“Well, it is stolen police property now,” Matt admitted. “So if you care about that, you might go after it. Otherwise,” he gave Steve a sunny smile, “We can try to have it back to you by five?”

Steve considered this.

“Yeah, alright,” he said. “You know where I live.”

Brett had not been expecting this. Brett had been expecting a long, drawn out month’s worth of demonstrations filled with rioters and protestors and people condemning the dehumanization of enhanced persons. He expected to be dedicating several teams to demonstrations over the next few weeks or so.

And to be fair, they had some of that.

But what he was entirely unprepared for was for a load of vigilantes to steal the object of fear, crack it against a few rocks, figure out how it works, and then hand it back tenderly to the police. The act in itself said, without a doubt, that they’d not only figured out how the collars worked, but they’d figured out how to override them and break out of them.

Nice try, guys, but we ain’t scared of that anymore.

It was surprisingly straightforward. They literally just got ahead of the curve.

Someone (Peter, obviously) leaked the information online for how to disable the collars. And Peter then retweeted this information to his Spiderman twitter account and before long, half the damn city of the New York knew how to disable the damn things.

It made the device itself practically useless.

Brett couldn’t tell if what he was feeling was relief or awe or frustration at having spent weeks trying to grapple with the metaphysics of this problem, only for it to be solved by a couple of criminals with a few lab hours on their hands.

Cap wasn’t all that bothered about his failed protest. In fact, Cap was just happy that he no longer had to wear the damn thing. He explained to Brett later that sometimes this was just how things worked in activism. Sometimes you do something and it just doesn’t quite hit the mark. All the feeling is there, but when it comes to addressing the base of a problem, sometimes you really do have to yield to those who knew more about the subject at hand.

The vigilantes of the city knew more about street-level fear and fear mongering than Cap did. They spent every day of their lives trying to sort through their own insecurities and the insecurities of others and trying to figure out how to make both work to their benefit. This behavior was an extension of that. They had more practice than the people up top at doing it and they were the ones more likely to be affected by the collars, so it kind of made sense to sit back and let them handle this the way they were used to.

Steve then, was more than happy to hand off the burden. Although he did leave Brett to go have a word with Peter about being an angry reckless shithead which Brett now thought, having spent the last week or so in the guy’s company, he was absolutely the worst person for.

When he got back to the station that night to stow away the bullet proof vest, he saw that the box of collars which had sat on the table outside the Captain’s office were gone.

That was validating, if nothing else.

He then went home to take a shower to sluice the stress of the last two weeks down the drain.