Oh, God...

[shieldborne]

Infinity War Open Post






THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Drop me a prompt, or ask me to drop you a prompt. Open to doomy pre-IW foreshadowing, fix-it AUs, post-IW angst, character interactions that should have happened but didn't on-screen, crossovers, and whatever else anyone can come up with.

Comments

[starkingenuity]

“Maybe they’re made of silicone instead of carbon or self lubricate,”Tony says, strolling back towards Pepper’s agent friend and Steve. He can’t help being a little bit rude from time to time. His humor depends upon it. A little smirk that mirrors the one he had given Loki is still on his face and he walks towards the door. “Meet on the bridge in ten.”

He assumes Steve will catch up with him in the hallway so he doesn’t slow down. The smirk, however, drops immediately from his face as he heads back towards the bathroom, and likely the hold that Steve found the evidence of weaponry in. This is getting crazier by the second. His life might be considered one big ball of crazy, but time traveling doubles and space aliens really just take the cake.

By the time Steve catches up with him, Tony has hit the hallway they’d bumped into earlier.

“The story checks out,” Tony says under his breath. “There’s an invasion coming. He’s here because he wants to be. Because he thinks he’s going to rule us. That stuff about Thanos? It’s true. We need to destroy those things. Immediately. Both of them. All of them.” He leaves out the subtle admiration he has for Loki, though. He can’t just decide to court disaster twice while in a relationship with Pepper. That’s low. Even for him. “I don’t care about waiting for the right time on this. Now is the right time.”

[shieldborne]

Steve sputters, ear-tips turning slightly pink at 'self-lubricate', and he has to clear his throat to cover a laugh. Phil is, as usual, blandly controlled in his reaction, but a smirk flickers across his face briefly. "I'll pass that theory along to our research department," he suggests, and thumps Steve companionably on the back as Tony departs.

There's only a couple moments' lag before the soldier emerges, serious and focused again, but with some of his earlier rage banked to embers. This time he doesn't grab Tony when he catches up, but walks very close to catch the quiet murmur.

"I'm not sure the HYDRA story doesn't check out," Steve responds. "After seeing the weapons in the hold. SHIELD is at least improving on their designs, and I don't like it. But handling evil aliens comes first, I guess."

How is this his life? He's fallen into a pulp series. "What I was told," he adds, having decided he and Tony are in on this together, personality conflict and latent sexual tension or no, "is that by allowing the invasion to play out and be repelled, we're buying time before Thanos comes to this planet. At the expense of a lot of damage and casualties, which..."

He still doesn't like it. His gut instinct is telling him Tony--this Tony--is 100% right and they should move on it right away, but he wants to make sure all the information is on the table first. "Fuck it. I wasn't a fan of that plan. Besides which, letting a madman run around the universe destroying planets unopposed seems wrong. But I don't think we can just grab the scepter and toss it in a volcano."

He's been rereading The Lord of the Rings, so sue him. "It takes more to destroy these things than what we have on hand, unless you've got ideas. They have something, but I haven't seen it."

[starkingenuity]

“Calm down, Frodo,” Tony says immediately. “If I can create clean energy the size of a hockey puck,” and stick it in his chest, “I can figure out a way to destroy a magic wand and a glowy box.” It’s full of hubris, that sentence, but hubris is what Tony does best. And he so rarely is disappointed by the outcome. There’s that smirk again, bright and shining, and he lifts his head slightly to gaze up at Steve, waiting for him to say boo to any of that. “There’s going to be an attack. And that’s more important than anything. We need to put the scepter somewhere safe, somewhere only we know the location of. We take care of this attack and then… I guess we go to Mordor.”

Tony is itching to get going here. He’s always like this before he takes on a new project. His blood runs hot and is muscles feel like they’ve been completely wound up in his arms and legs. Someone just needs to pull the pin and let him whirlwind across the globe.

“Can you do that? You’re squeaky clean. Even if you have such a terribly vulgar vocabulary. They’ll never suspect you, Cap.”

{{Stark and Rogers versus Stark and Rogers is a go!}}

((sorry, the holiday weekend got me))

[shieldborne]

Steve is visibly skeptical, though he refrains from expressing it verbally. There's something searching and dark in his eyes when he meets Tony's smirk, because they could be screwing this up. Tony could be his father's son, and Howard sure wasn't in a hurry to destroy the Cube after he fished it out of the Atlantic. In the end, though, Tony is the guy he's formed the most personal connection with in the modern world. Peggy is alive but there's a gulf of seventy years between them. Phil is great, but a stranger. Fury is...Fury. He and Tony aren't best buddies yet, but he can feel the potential. He's willing to take it on faith, because he has to be.

"You better figure it out fast," he says after a moment, as a last caveat. "Because there's gonna be at least three interested parties trying to track the stones. SHIELD, Thanos, and us."

He takes a breath. "We keep the scepter out of New York City, the gateway to the invading force won't be able to open. Yeah. I can get the scepter and hide it. I'll have to steal a plane; we're over water right now and I'm not interested in swimming down the East Coast."

Goddammit. He just volunteered to crash another fucking airplane, didn't he? Well, maybe if he fakes his death that will buy them some extra time to strategize. "They told me the stone in it can cause heightened aggression. I'll fake like I've snapped. They've been watching me for signs of instability anyway."

"What are you going to do in the meantime?"

Re: ((sorry, the holiday weekend got me))

[starkingenuity]

It probably isn’t a bad question. Tony should be able to tell Steve what he already has cooking in the back of his brain but he doesn’t trust the guy his dad always seemed to like better. The bottled blond, the serum, the kid he’d met during the war, these are the things Howard Stark had treasured, so much so that he had patented the very blood running through that kid’s veins. Tony actually wonders if he should say that, tell Steve, but it’s his secret, one that hopefully will never come up. The chaotic and reckless part of Tony wants to tell him everything, suddenly, but he loves keeping secrets. He loves knowing more than anyone else in the room.

And he’s pretty sure Steve will just flip out right now anyway. So this is for the beat.

Tony glances over the large blond’s shoulder, at the clear hallway, and tries to maneuver around him without touching him. “Leave it up to me. I’m going to go poke the Jolly Green Giant inside Pooh Bear and create the distraction you’re going to need.”

He assumes Steve knows he’ll have a way to contact him. If not, he’ll figure it out when Tony commandeers whatever technology with a speaker and WiFi there is nearby after the coast is clear.

((I hope you had a good vacay!))

((I did, ty!))

[shieldborne]

This Steve trusts too easily, perhaps. He's good at sniffing out a lie in a new situation; if he's on high alert he's always intensely observant, always strategizing, and in looking for an opening, he'll see flaws and details most people miss. But at this point he doesn't know Tony well enough to keep an eye out for a hidden agenda. He knows he's not HYDRA and he's not an evil alien, and that makes him an ally. One of the good guys.

He's gonna take this one on faith. But it does sound like an absolutely terrible plan, and a bit cruel. "He's not going to thank you for that," he warns. "And neither is anyone else."

Actually, no, he hates this idea. "You're going to endanger the lives of everyone on this vessel. Yourself included."

But like the older version of himself, this Cap has a pragmatic streak. The ends don't quite justify the means, but they don't have time to create an elaborate plan, either. "Fine. But you damn well better make it worth it," he growls out, "And you better come up with some ideas on how to contain him, stat."

He backs off a step to let Tony go. They need to move now, and getting the scepter without interference is going to be tricky.

Re: ((I did, ty!))

[starkingenuity]

Tony takes a moment to tilt his head over, almost like a puppy might when he hears a command but isn’t sure what to do with it (and certainly has no intention of following it anyway). “The guy hasn’t had an incident in seven years. He can stand a little poking.” Steve is uptight, but not in a way that annoys him so much as amuses him. Tony simply has an affinity for the Hulk and for the scientist that encapsulated him.

Bruce Banner is everything he is and everything he isn’t all at once. Steve can’t quite compete with that yet, even with Tony’s knowledge of the future.

Walking away, he waves his hand at the blond and wanders down to the lab. It’s where the scepter is, and technically, they’re supposed to be analyzing it. It’s why he needs Bruce in a place where he won’t ask questions. He doesn’t realize that Bruce tends not to ask questions actually. He stays as far away from the action as possible. So, while he does in fact notice that Steve Rogers comes in for the scepter and he does in fact realize what Tony is doing, he’s not going to confront anyone about it. Certainly not the man that he’d been trying to emulate with his experiments, that’s for sure.

Unfortunately, Bruce isn’t the only one who’s noticed a sudden change in the status quo. Tony rolls his eyes and nudges his nose with his thumb to shoulder Steve away from the mess of SHIELD agents they’d just rendered unconscious trying to control the attack meant to be happening in less than an hour. “Problem. You just went AWOL, Cap.”

[shieldborne]

Steve assumes, perhaps, that Bruce is more volatile than he actually is. Or maybe he assumes Tony is more determined to draw out his green alter-ego than he actually is. He still thinks this is dangerous. The only thing more dangerous than a shell-shocked super soldier with an exaggerated startle response is a shell-shocked Hulk with an exaggerated startle response. He's been debriefed. He's seen footage. But he doesn't blame Bruce for the being that lives inside him, and he's been perfectly civil thus far.

He goes in a few minutes after Tony, acting like he's simply there to check on their progress. Not like he has any right; he's slightly more closely affiliated with SHIELD, but he's not exactly an agent, and certainly not a commanding officer. Tony would be the only one to question that right now, though, and he's too busy prodding Banner.

Scepter in hand, he's quick to make his way down to the planes. He leaves a few casualties behind, but no one dead or seriously injured, and if the entirety of the helicarrier is now on high alert thanks to his shenanigans, fine. They should be.

Down on the ground, the older Steve has limited means to pay attention to whatever programs and bugs Tony has laid down. He's eyeing the half-dozen vehicles left behind, wondering if they should disable them to make sure they're not followed, when Tony nudges into him.

"Wait, what?" It takes a second for his brain to catch up and remember there's two of him. "Shit. Shit! AWOL how; what's he doing??"

Wow, it isn't until now he fully realized how irritating he can be. Maybe this is a lesson that's been a long time coming.

[starkingenuity]

Tony gives a little shrug, not because this isn’t a big deal but because of course this is a thing that is currently happening because Fury had known all along that every single member of the Avengers is — was — volatile. Going off script is one thing but Tony can’t tell exactly how or why. There’s no communication here and FRIDAY has only been able to tell him that Steve Rogers left the hellicarrier on a quintet.

Nothing more.

It’s really not a whole lot to go on and they’re too far away now and occupied to do anything physically about it. Tony can already see Steve starting to put contingency plans into place, which is good, but also probably the worst thing for them both right now. They don’t have the information they need to put any of this right.

“He took a quintet. FRIDAY is tracking him. When he lands, we’ll have a chat.” Otherwise, Tony is pretty sure he’ll just freak out and they don’t need to give Steve another rough water landing. “It’s too soon to know where to.”

Or even to narrow it down. The world is a big place.

[Sorry bear with me. I started a new job and I’m in training. No phones allowed for tagging. :(]

[shieldborne]

Let's be honest here; for the remaining two living Avengers, 'volatile' still applies in a big way. Steve was counting on the remnants of military discipline in his younger self. That we have orders; we should follow them instinct that he clung to for a while even after the Chitauri invasion, when he was working for SHIELD. He's never been great with authority, but it took a lot to really shake him. It took--

Oh, Christ. He's made a huge tactical error. He should have told the younger Tony something else. Anything but the truth he actually shared, which he should have guessed might leave Tony's lips at some point, too. "If they talked to each other, we may be fucked," he tells his Tony.

Because of course hearing HYDRA survived within SHIELD would send his younger self off the deep end. "Can FRIDAY tell whether Loki's still in containment on the carrier?"

Because if not, they're going to have to make a big adjustment in plans, but otherwise, they've got no better ideas than Plan A for the moment.


[[Not a problem at all! I'm in VA bracing for a lot of rain from the hurricane so I am probably facing power outages over the next few days. In case I go quiet for a while, that's probably why.]]

[starkingenuity]

It’s not in Tony’s nature to comfort through touch. He sets his hand in Steve’s chest anyway, telling himself it’s just to feel the fine job Angel had done with his uniform, picked up just that morning. In reality, though, he’s already made Steve his touch stone and he needs to have that moment of grounding himself. He’s pretty sure Steve does too. They’re wildly different people, their empathy runs in opposite directions, but there’s a point they meet at and overlap in briefly. That’s what connects them here.

“Loki’s still there. The escape has to go as planned. Can you finish mopping up here? I’ll go and meet our straggler.”

The armor is waiting in sentry mode behind them, sweeping the area for visual and heat signatures. It’s waiting for Tony to step back inside, a throw back concept to an idea he had improved upon before Thanos ruined the technology, disrupting the nanomachine matrix. He’s still bitter about that and it’s easier to be angry for that reason than to focus on the crushing reality of everyone being dead.

It makes him want to see Pepper and Happy. And Peter.

And he can’t do that.

Tony doesn’t wait for a confirmation from Steve. He just heads back towards the armor and it welcomes him inside, closing comfortably around him. FRIDAY already has trajectories up showing him the best course to rendezvous with the wayward Rogers and he goes, knowing he’ll be landing in a forced open cargo bay in twenty minutes.

It’s not the first time today that Steve has had a visitor to a plane he’s been on in mid flight.

[Oh my gosh! Please be safe!!!]

[shieldborne]

It's very much Steve's nature to comfort through touch. He's well enough aware by now that Tony isn't as tactile, and it's easy to assume when he reaches out it's because he knows Steve gets something from it. Either way, something in him shifts and gives when the other man presses his hand against his chest, and in the back of his brain that same something murmurs see, this is what matters.

And it is, in a way. Broken souls reaching across a gulf to try and nudge one another's chipped and shattered fragments back into place. But that kind of thinking won't save the world, most likely, so all he does is give Tony a gentle squeeze to that forearm and nods. "On it. Be careful. If he's upset...and carrying the scepter...?"

Well. He doesn't think he was ever so volatile he'd gratuitously attack Tony without an outside influence, but the Mind Stone is a new wrinkle.

In mid flight, the younger Steve is, in fact, as twitchy and unsettled as he's ever been. The scepter is an unpleasant copilot. It glows and flickers in the corner of his eye, and the more time he spends in its company, the more he wants to just see it destroyed as soon as humanly possible.

Tony's arrival will be heralded by a blue streak of anachronistic swears. He wasn't lying when he claimed he learned to curse as a kid and only tried to lose the habit later. This younger version knows his way around an f-bomb. The way he locks his fist around the handle of the scepter, though, suggests it isn't going anywhere without a serious fight.

"I'm warning you, Stark, keep your fucking distance. I already survived one nose dive into the Atlantic and I really don't want another but I'm betting I'd come out more intact than you would."

That's not a good bet for him to make, actually, considering the suit and all, but maybe he's not at his best right now. His nerves are a little frayed.

[[I am so sorry. I'm fine but there was weather and I lost control of my inbox and I seriously thought I had replied to this already.]]

[starkingenuity]

[Glad everything is okay and welcome back!]

“It’s sexy when you growl like that,” Tony teases because he can’t help himself. “But don’t take your pants off yet. I’m just curious to know when you’re going. Or get where you’re going confirmed because FRIDAY is pretty good at reading my mind.” Tony had a lot of property around the world, and that includes a lot of private islands. He has no idea just how many he has, but that’s why he has a super computer AI do the work at remembering important stuff like this, and like where he’s put his keys, for him.

The Iron Man armor splits open and Tony saunters out of it. It’s a calculated risk, but he knows that Steve won’t hurt him.

Probably. It took a whole lot of attempting to kill his bestie to force his hand against him last time. They’re no where near that here. The scepter might not be helping matters but it won’t force Steve to go that far against his character.

Again, probably.

Tony doesn’t take the tine to calculate the odds, he just plops down in the jump seat to Steve’s right.

“You’re going in the opposite direction we need you to so we can smash the Mind Stone. That’s cool and all, but I don’t even know what bending time and space like this is going to do in the long run. I don’t really want to find my Facial Hair Bro here either. So can you please turn around? For me?”

[shieldborne]

Steve glances back at him for a fleeting moment, as if to make sure this is the older Tony Stark he met in the church. He was pretty sure it was, just by the entrance he made, and the fine lines and sprinkling of silver in his hair confirms it. Unfortunately. That's going to be a problem.

"You've been monitoring the helicarrier," he accuses grimly. It's not a huge leap of logic; there's no other way he'd have been able to track Steve's flight so quickly. "Pulling strings."

He's not about to lash out at him--at least not yet--but his grip on the scepter shifts, and there's an unsettling little warning glimmer in the stone. "Don't be cute. I know breaking the stone isn't the first order of business for you two. We decided it needs to be."

"Tell you what, you bring whatever you were going to use to destroy it to a place on neutral ground, and I'll let you break it right there. No gateway to an invading force."

[starkingenuity]

“In my defense, I didn’t put the bug in the hellicarrier,” Tony says. “I mean yes, if you want to be technical, I did. Before. You know what, that gets old pretty fast. Our first order of business is to keep the people we love alive and as unchanged as possible. So I get that you aren’t willing to trust me, I wouldn’t trust me either honestly, but we can’t just save the city from the Chitauri attack. It changes too much and it gives Thanos a reason to come here himself. We don’t want that. You don’t want that either.”

Tony sees that little move there and it makes him nervous. Killing the younger Steve is not on the menu. The world would be a far worse place without the First Avenger on the side of Justice. Unfortunately, if it comes right down to it, Tony is going to pick himself over this guy here. There’s another Captain America waiting in the wings. And one with a lot less of a hair trigger finger.

He doesn’t want a repeat of their fight, though. They don’t have the history but it would hurt him just as much.

“The Chitauri have to invade. Loki needs to be defeated. The Avengers have to form. If you destroy that stone right now, pardon the expression, we are all fucked. And not in the fun way, though I know you don’t have a frame of reference for that yet. You will. But only if you stop being an idiot and think with your head here.”

[shieldborne]

"What?" Steve sounds both irritated and resigned. "You're giving me a headache, Stark. Why are you so irritating?"

Attractive, but annoying. Okay, maybe the presence of the Mind Stone is fraying some of his already-frail ability to be tactful. "You talk too goddamn much."

But, hey, if minor insults are all the stone inspires in him at the moment, that's probably for the best for all concerned. "Look. I get what you're saying about your plan; I just don't agree with it. We divert Thanos from this world for how long? A few years? Great. How many other planets does he destroy in the meantime? You're giving me stall tactics; I want to hear you have an endgame."

His gaze is sharp, out of the corner of his eyes, borderline incandescent. He doesn't know which Tony to trust right now; maybe neither. He definitely doesn't trust his older self. He asked for precisely none of this bullshit, and he's been out of the ice for a little over a month. That, and he hates airplanes. Seriously, just fuck airplanes in general.

"Do you have an endgame, Stark? If Thanos is this dangerous, he needs to be taken on and taken down."

[starkingenuity]

“Right now, our nine billion people are the end game,” Tony insists. He doesn’t know if he’s gotten through to the blond or if Steve is coming to the conclusion he already had: fighting isn’t the solution. “It’s not good enough for you. And it’s not good enough for me either. It’s just an obtainable goal. He won’t come here if he doesn’t have a reason. We can fill the rest in later.”

In a calculated risk, Tony leaves the general safety of his armor and stretches out on the jumpseat behind Steve. He’s within range of the other man, and Steve can incapacitate him before FRIDAY can react.

He hopes to show trust. He doesn’t know how well it’s going over though. “I’m going to tell you right now that we don’t have the ability to stop him. Not right now. Not even when I’m from. What we’re doing now is buying some time.”

He isn’t sure how much Steve is listening to him right now. The guy is so damned stubborn. That means that Tony is going to have to offer something up.

“It’s not just time for us. But for your pal Barnes. He’s alive. He’s HYDRA. Brainwashed. And we are going to need him.”

[shieldborne]

Steve is struggling. He's been struggling since he came out of the ice--which is what the older version of himself has been trying to warn Tony about, without knowing how to phrase the warning. He's physically enhanced, mentally enhanced, and some of the restructuring and shoring-up of his brain gives him superhuman cognitive abilities, eidetic memory, but that doesn't mean he's immune to emotional trauma. And he's been hit with a lot of it. It's hard to say whether he's held up better than a normal human would, under the changes he's been subjected to, or worse.

He's not well. Not as depressed as the version Tony's become close with, but much angrier, and more detached from the world around him. It's not his world.

He is beyond reading into the way Tony's sprawled in the jumpseat, too, past being able to note it as a show of trust. All that he can do for the moment is pick apart the words he's being fed. Buying time. Nine billion people. Gods and monsters and magical stones. How can any of this possibly be real?

Maybe it isn't. Maybe he's dreaming, or having that psychotic break SHIELD has been watching him for. The world around him has a faint bluish haze he's just now noticing, and the next things Tony says seem to come from a long distance away, moving slow and languid like bubbles deep under icy water.

Barnes. HYDRA. Brainwashed.

"Bucky...?" His single-word response is strangely soft and childlike, probably a truly bad sign. But even if he's dissociating out of sheer shock and loss, he's still cognizant enough to recognize the implication. If Tony's telling him the truth, and Bucky is alive, has been in HYDRA hands for seventy fucking years--and when he

found him on Zola's table before all he
could say at first was his name, rank and serial number--

how could he still be alive through seventy years of
torture?--except Steve survived decades of ice and Zola had given Bucky
something, he barely remembered what, did not want to talk about it


so it's not impossible
except
it

is
because everything

since the serum
has been. fucking. impossible--

He's not even fully aware of what his body is doing when he launches himself out of the pilot's seat. He can kind of see the plane from outside, watch through the windshield as he turns, scepter in hand and more or less flings himself on top of Tony with the staff between them, pinning him--unless he dodges exceptionally quickly--where he lies.

"WHERE?!"

[starkingenuity]

There’s an internal conversation going on right now, and Tony can see signs of it all over Steve’s face. He doesn’t have time to do much, for even though his brain has already figured out what’s going to happen, his body doesn’t quite manage to catch up. Thankfully, Tony’s known for quite some time that his body, no matter how hard he works it and how far he pushes it, just isn’t up to par with his brain power. The Iron Man suit, standing sentry, is the result of that understanding.

Tony doesn’t have the physical resources to protect himself from Steve Rogers, but he doesn’t need to. All it takes is one threatening move and the armor is there to pry the offending hand off of him.

“Woah!” It’s more of a grunt than anything and Tony sets a hand out towards the armor. “Just land is somewhere!”

Five words is probably too much, though. Tony needs to divert his attention to the lighter haired version of his lover before he gets his face pounded in.

“Wrong guy to ask,” he hurries up to say, mostly to keep the panic from taking over. He remembers being this close to Steve without their clothes off before. It would be too easy to slip into that mode again. Thankfully, it’s not really fear that he feels right now, it’s anger. This whole situation is supposed to be helping the world, but they’re on a spiraling course to crash into it instead. Tony grits his teeth. “I’m not the resident expert on your bestie. And you should look into Altoids.”

[shieldborne]

Steve reacts to the armor grabbing him much like a twitchy PTSD-riddled soldier would be expected to react. He's being pulled back, and he's not sure by what or whom, but the armor is strong enough to handle him. He struggles pretty ferociously nonetheless, but maybe they're in luck, because he drops the scepter in the brief tussle, and then he's way, way more interested in what Tony has to say than the stone or its affect on him.

The scepter spins partway across the floor and lodges itself against some webbing in the cargo hold. The stone is gleaming fitfully, but at this point it's honestly hard to say why. Might be a reaction to Steve. Might even be Loki working on it from a distance. Might be nothing but a trick of the light.

Released by the armor, Steve staggers into Tony, and he makes an attempt to grab at his shirt collar, but that's as violent as he gets now, at least for the moment. That, at least, frees FRIDAY to work on landing the plane.

"If you tell me you're lying," Steve says, "I won't even be mad. It's a good trick. Disruptive."

There's no color in his face. "But if you're not--why wouldn't he tell me??"

[starkingenuity]

The hurt Tony sees in Steve’s eyes is enough to make him look away. He shouldn’t allow that to happen, he needs to keep his back against the wall, but Steve has always managed to make him feel at ease and raise his hackles at the same time. He’s been able to fly off the handle because he knows the blond will (almost) always be the guiding light and the voice of reason. It’s terrible to be in this position, but Tony has never erred on the side of caution before he isn’t going to try now. The suit has powered down, FRIDAY is working on landing the quinjet, and there is nothing left for Tony to do but have this uncomfortable conversation.

His shoulders relax, and he glances up at Rogers almost experimentally, testing the waters as it were. The hurt is still there. He doesn’t like it.

“Oh gee, maybe because he’s you and he knows that he’d drop anything and everything to save James Barnes?” Not now, though. Now, Steve has matured a little. He’s hardened. And somehow, Tony knows he’s choosing him by leaving Bucky for his younger self. It feels good, a reversal of the battle they’d fought. It’s win-win for everyone, he thinks, because he’s obviously a better catch than a cyber armed, brainwashed soldier. “Barnes is next on the list. Or maybe it’s HYDRA and then Barnes. Listen, I don’t have the list, but he’s on there. We’re going to get him out. Or you are. You guys can discuss who does what. Right now, though, we need to keep aliens from completely invading earth, make sure that the Super Club has their inaugural meeting, and then destroy a few space rocks crafted when the universe began. So can we please get back on track here? The Avengers need you. You’re the first. You’re the leader. And if you’re out here listening to a stupid version of me, we are going to be in a lot of trouble.”

[shieldborne]

"He's family. He's all I have," Steve explains, unaware that explaining is the last thing he needs to do.

But he's seen the way Tony glanced away, some of the tension easing from him, the shifty-eyed awkward irascibility. There's something human about it all, something soft enough to shake him out of the blind fugue of shock and rage. He still feels like he's drowning in all of this. It's too much, way too much, but he's conscious of being present in his own body once more and rational enough to thank God he didn't actually hurt Tony.

"I don't know how the fuck you expect me to lead anything," he says, slowly letting him go and stepping back. "I don't belong here."

Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. Once, twice. "I still don't like it. And he's not stupid, the younger you. He's arrogant, maybe he has some ulterior motives he didn't feel like sharing, but his heart's in the right place."

Okay, that's an unfortunate metaphor, maybe, but Steve is oblivious to that. "Sacrificing New York to save the universe--I mean, that's a fair trade, I guess, but that doesn't make it our place to choose it."

He frowns at Tony a little. "You're a genius, why can't you just reroute the door in space? Send the invading army somewhere else. Crash 'em into the sun or something. That'd send the message you want, wouldn't it?"