cap_ironman | fic: Freezer Burn

Freezer Burn
by Domenika Marzione (

miss_porcupine)
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble; a mashup between the movies and the 616-verse.
LJ tag | ao3

Summary: The adventures of Steve Rogers, defrosted soldier, who is missing time but not really all that lost. He's got a surprisingly broad knowledge of lettuces, a working grasp of modern technology, and may or may not be using both to mess with his teammates and save the world.

A snippet:

A put-upon sigh filled the room. "I'm just saying that your request for a list of 'modern miracles and wonders,'" - Steve could hear Tony making air quotes, even if he couldn't see them - "would be easier to compile if we knew what kind of person we were looking at. Is it someone dumbstruck by indoor plumbing? Are they flummoxed by a blu-ray player? Are they able to follow a graduate-level article on partially ionized force field generation? If we can't tell if they are they building their own particle colliders or birdhouses out of popsicle sticks, it's kind of hard to narrow it down."

Bruce put down the not-a-soldering-iron carefully, lifted up his protective goggles so that they were on top of his head like cat ears, and sat down on his stool. And then he started laughing, a silent laugh that reached his eyes and, for one brilliant shining moment, let Steve see who Bruce might've been if The Other Guy wasn't around.

"Tony," Steve began patiently, sure his smile was audible. "There is a very big gap between barely understanding how to dig a latrine trench and building space shuttles. Those of us who are more on the popsicle birdhouse side of that divide have it covered. What I'm asking you is for the space shuttle angle."

A surround-sound snort. "Space shuttles are easy, just for the record? I built my first orbit-capable module when I was nine."

"You went into space when you were nine?" Bruce asked, skeptically. Or, really, that kind-of-skeptical that you had to use when Tony was telling you things about his life because so much was plausible and it was sometimes hard to tell when he was full of it without calling Pepper first. Pepper, bless her, was used to these sorts of queries.

"I did not. Because my father wasn't impressed with my re-entry protocols and my mother didn't like the idea of having to send the Navy out to the middle of the Indian Ocean to fish her little boy out of the drink," Tony answered, still managing to sound aggrieved at the injustice.

"Okay, so let's set our baseline at 'people who could work for the space program' and not 'people who could singlehandedly be the space program?" Steve suggested.

This turned out to be harder to follow through on than Steve had imagined. Entirely because Tony really had a hard time gauging what constituted an average intelligence and no ability to scale up or down.

"I don't intentionally interact with average people," Tony explained after the fourth time Steve and Bruce suggested he was being hilariously patronizing. "Who would?"

Notes: This story is a WIP that is being updated regularly; it currently stands at around 58k words. It is updated by scene on LJ (23 parts so far) and those scenes are collected into chapters on AO3 (12 chapters so far).