ext_34821 (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
cap_ironman2012-01-25 10:19 pm
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2012-01-25 10:19 pm
Thaw, or: Four Avengers in a Transian Shack Part 3
Title: Thaw, or: Four Avengers in a Transian Shack
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai and elspethdixon
Universe: 616
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Beta: None
Summary: The Avengers are stranded in the snowy Transian mountains. Pre-slash cliché-fic originally written for hc_bingo’s “hypothermia/exposure” prompt.
Word Count: 20,382
Authors’ note: This is set just after the red thong incident where Tony's identity as Iron Man was revealed to the rest of the team. Thanks to the beauty of the Marvel telescoping timeline, we’ve decided that it’s taking place in the early 2000s rather than the 70s.
Thaw, or: Four Avengers in a Transian Shack
The door flew open, rebounding off the opposite wall with a slam, and cold air rushed into the room. Jan jumped to her feet, dragging the blanket with her, just as Cap and Tony literally fell through the door.
Filled with relief – they weren't dead, they were here, the avalanche hadn't killed them – she lunged past them to shut the door. Being happy they were alive didn't mean she was willing to let what little warmth she and Don had managed to find escape. The wind fought her, and it took throwing all her bodyweight against the door to force it closed.
Jan sagged against it for a moment, exhaustion seeping in now that the nagging worry over Cap and Tony's whereabouts was gone. When she drew herself up and turned around again, the worry came rushing back.
Tony and Cap were lying motionless on the floor, covered in snow. There was no sign of the Iron Man armor; both of them were bareheaded, Tony clad only in trousers and shirtsleeves, and Cap's cowl nowhere in evidence. Don was already kneeling next to them, one hand on Cap's shoulder.
"You made it," he was saying. "We were hoping the two of you had flown away to get help, but frankly I'm just glad you're alive. What happened to you?"
Cap lifted his head a little, blinking tiredly at Don. "There was an explosion," he said hoarsely, voice thick with exhaustion. "I got Tony out of the water, but we couldn't find anyone else." He shook his head, as if trying to force himself back to alertness; his hair was stiff with ice. "I need to go back out. We still have men out--." He shoved himself up to his hands and knees, then broke off abruptly and knelt there, swaying, head down.
Don took him by the shoulder again, steadying him. "Steve," he said, gently, "do you know what year it is?"
Cap's head snapped up, and he stared at Don blankly, a look of vague horror on his face. "The future?" His voice wavered slightly on the word. Then he blinked, a little more awareness seeping into his eyes, and frowned. "But... you're not any older. I don't-" Then he smiled, sagging back against Tony in relief. "Don. We found you. Is Jan here?"
Jan stepped away from the door, into his line of sight. "Yes," she said. "I'm here. And that was mean, Don."
"He sounded disoriented," Don said. "I wanted to make sure he wasn't having some kind of flashback."
"I haven't had those in years," Cap muttered, sounding slightly sullen. He wrapped an arm around Tony again, curling his body protectively around him.
Tony still hadn't moved. He was dead white with cold, his lips blue and his hair as thick with ice as Cap's was. If they'd really fallen into water somehow – God, they were lucky to still be alive.
Tony was alive, right?
As if he'd read her mind, Don leaned across Cap and pressed two fingers to Tony's throat searching for a pulse. After a long, tense moment, he nodded, and Jan let out a slow breath of relief.
"We need to get their clothes off," Don said, meeting her eyes over Cap's head. "Get them a little closer to the fire."
The last time Jan had stripped Tony Stark's clothing off, it had been under far more pleasant and entertaining circumstances. For one thing, he'd been an active participant, rather than lying frighteningly limp while she tried to wrestle clothing off his overly-long limbs. For another, undressing Tony in order to have outstanding but surprisingly vanilla sex with him hadn't involved talking an only partially coherent Cap into letting go of him first.
"You're safe now," Don was saying, in a calm, authoritative tone that they probably taught you in med school. "You got both of you here safely, and now you need to let us help Tony, okay? We need to get those wet clothes off both of you."
Cap reluctantly uncurled from around Tony and sat up, watching intently as Jan unbuttoned Tony's shirt and struggled to get it off him as gently as possible.
"Careful of his fingers." Don eased Tony's socks off, first the left and then the right, slowly exposing his feet. There was a long, jagged cut across his left heel, and one of the toenails on his right foot was torn. Both injuries were bloodless, his socks barely even stained – was that good, or bad? "Don't try to rub them dry; there could be ice crystals in the tissue. That goes for you, too, Steve. No rubbing your hands or feet to try and warm them up."
Cap made an indistinct noise, neither agreement nor disagreement. He was pulling one of his gloves off with his teeth, eyes still fixed on Tony. "He needs his fingers," he said, spitting out the glove. "You can't let them turn black and fall off." It had the sound of an order.
Don pressed a finger against the sole of Tony's foot, then did the same thing to each of his toes. "There's still some resilience. I don't think he's going to lose his feet, though he might want to when they start thawing out." He frowned at Cap, who was now tugging ineffectually at one boot. "Stop that. Give me your foot and let me help you."
By the time Jan had Tony down to his underwear, Don and Cap were still peeling damp, frozen leather off Cap's body. Beneath his costume, his skin was almost as pale as Tony's, and he swayed visibly when Don hauled him to his feet to strip his pants off, bracing himself against the wall.
If someone had told her, prior to today, that she'd get the chance to see Cap without those tight leather pants and wouldn't enjoy it in the slightest, she... would probably have believed them, actually. Over the years, she'd found that being a superhero offered a distressingly wide variety of unpleasant experiences involving nudity.
"We need to dump the coffee out and start heating some water," Don said, as he eased Steve to the floor a few yards away from the stove. "We can soak cloths in it and use them to warm their hands, feet, and faces."
Cap shook his head. "Mine are fine. Tony needs-"
"You are not fine," Don said firmly. "Just because you miraculously survived being frozen once doesn't mean you're immune to frostbite and hypothermia. Your balance and coordination are compromised, you're shaking, and you've been walking through the snow for God knows how long in wet boots." He turned back to Jan. "We need to get both of them warm now. Help me get Tony closer to the stove, and then I'll start heating the water."
The two of them half-dragged, half-carried Tony across the cabin to lay him down next to Cap, with one blanket between them and the floor, and another spread over them. It seemed pitifully inadequate, given Tony's still, cold pallor and Steve's convulsive shudders and chattering teeth.
When she said so, Don nodded. "They don't have enough body heat left to warm themselves back up." He kept pumping water into their saucepan as he spoke, the pump handle moving easily. Maybe she had loosened it up for him. "Cap might be all right with just blankets, something hot to drink and first aid for frostbite, but I wouldn't rely on it, especially not out here with no way to get help if he gets worse. And Tony..." he trailed off, glancing at Cap, and lowered his voice. "Severe hypothermia can cause cardiac arrhythmia. If we don't get his core temperature back up, he could be in a lot of trouble."
Cap had curled around Tony again, oblivious to the discussion – his eyes were half lidded, and Jan suspected he was only partially awake. He'd seemed mostly coherent earlier, but he also didn't seem to have noticed Jan's state of undress, something that would normally have gotten a blush and an averted gaze.
And Tony...
'A lot of trouble' was probably an understatement.
"We're going to have to get under the blankets with them," she said. She and Don were the only heat sources in the cabin other than the stove, which made laying together for warmth the only viable option. "I'll take Tony." If she was going to be cuddling mostly-naked with one of her male teammates, it might as well be someone she'd already slept with. "You take Cap."
"We'll put them between us." Don let go of the pump handle and picked up the full pan of water. The cabin was small enough that it only took a handful of uneven steps for him to return to the stove, and the pan went back onto the stovetop, hissing as the water that had splashed down the sides hit the hot metal and evaporated away.
Jan glanced from the stove, where the water was going to take at least ten minutes to boil, to where her teammates lay huddled in a nest of blankets. "And we thought sitting around naked together was awkward," she muttered. "Hank is going to flip out when he hears about this."
Then she winced, realizing what she'd said. She didn't care how Hank might have felt about it, Jan reminded herself. She was through with Hank, and his excuses and insecurities and nasty habit of lashing out at people, mainly her.
Don, thankfully, said nothing. He lowered himself to one knee, then to the floor, to slide under the blanket next to Cap; he was putting almost no weight on his bad leg, Jan saw, and she felt a brief flash of guilt for letting him help her haul Tony and Cap around. He'd been through an avalanche, walked almost a mile through the snow, and now he was going to be sleeping on a hard wooden floor.
They couldn't do anything about it, though, and she doubted he would appreciate her sympathy, any more than she would have appreciated his.
Tony's skin was ice cold against hers when she crawled under the blanket, and she had to fight the urge to flinch back from him, making herself press her feet against his freezing ones – carefully, remembering Don's warning about ice crystals – and wrap her arms around his torso.
There was still ice in his hair, bits of it melting and brushing cold water against her forehead when she pressed her face into the back of his neck.
Cap shifted his own grip on Tony slightly, mumbling something, and one of his hands brushed against her bare arm, a fresh jolt of cold that did make her flinch.
Jan closed her eyes, and started counting off the minutes it would take for the water to heat.
* * *
His hands and feet were starting to burn. The rest of him felt as if his muscles and bones had never completely thawed after he'd been chipped out of the ice, even Don's heat against his back not enough to do more than keep him from actively freezing, but the wet cloths Jan had just wrapped around his hands and feet were boiling hot.
And now Don was pressing new, even hotter ones against his ears.
They were probably just warm rather than actually hot, Steve knew, and the fact that he was regaining feeling in his extremities was a good thing.
A good thing that hurt like hell.
Had it been this bad the last time?
Maybe it was a small blessing that Tony was still unconscious. At least he'd be spared some of the pain as his frozen hands and feet came back to life.
Tony's face tensed, and he started to struggle weakly, one of his feet kicking Steve right in the shin. There was so little force behind the blow that it didn't even hurt, barely jarring his leg.
"No." Tony slammed his head back, the back of his skull smacking into Jan's cheekbone. "Let go."
Steve loosened his grip on Tony as much as he could without actually moving his arms – moving took effort – and forced words past chattering teeth. "S'just us. It's okay." He was shivering harder now than he'd been when they'd come in out of the cold, the muscles in his back tense and aching from what felt like hours' worth of shaking.
Tony's eyes opened, wide but unfocussed. "Burning won't work, I..." He shoved at Steve's chest with his free arm, the motion slow and uncoordinated. "...build it for you. I won't..."
"Tony," Jan said, through gritted teeth, "hold still." Just as Don said,
"If he keeps thrashing around, he's going to hurt himself," directly into Steve's ear.
"Tony," Steve tried again. "Iron Man. We're safe. We made it."
Tony went limp, and for a moment, Steve thought he'd passed out again. Alarm began forcing its way through the exhaustion hazing his thoughts, and then Tony said his name.
"Steve. We- we found the cabin."
He sounded as tired as Steve felt, the words low and hoarse. Steve let himself relax again, his eyes shutting almost by themselves. Tony was awake, and talking. He wasn't going to die. His heart wasn't going to give out from the shock of his body warming up again.
Steve hadn't lost anybody this time.
Don's hand reached over Steve's shoulder, feeling at the base of Tony's throat, probably for a pulse. Tony tried to twitch his head away, frowning again. There was a vague kind of confusion on his face that just looked... wrong on Tony.
"Where's my... we left the armor. We have to go get it. Doom is out there and-" He thrashed weakly for a moment, trying to get up, then collapsed back against Steve's chest. "Have to go and get it," he repeated, a disturbing edge of hysteria in his voice.
"We will." Don's baritone voice was soothing, but firm. "Right now, you're going to lie there and get warm again." It was the way paramedics spoke to accident victims, the way Steve himself tried to sound whenever the Avengers or he and Sam rescued people from disasters or burning buildings.
It occurred to him that he was just lying there and letting Don take charge. A civilian, for all that he was associated with the Avengers and somehow the same person as Thor. He shouldn't just lie there while a civilian did his job.
"We'll go back for it later," he promised. "And stop trying to break Jan's nose."
Tony stopped struggling. "Later," he echoed. "I'll... hold you to that." Then, "Jan?" He rolled his head back, looking over his shoulder at Jan. "You're naked," he said, sounding vaguely pleased and significantly calmer. "And so is Steve. I like this cabin."
Fabric rustled as Jan shifted. "You know," she sighed, "if someone had told me yesterday that I'd spend tonight naked in bed with three men, this is not how I would have imagined it. I would have pictured something a lot less embarrassing."
Somehow, the fact that he was effectively naked in the same 'bed' as one of his female teammates had not occurred to Steve until that moment. Trying to not jar Tony, he pulled his legs in closer to his body. Don's warm skin and Tony's chilled, clammy skin pressed against his own wasn't remotely erotic – Steve's body was too exhausted and frozen to respond even if he'd wanted it to – but the sudden memory of Jan's naked breasts, small and high, with nipples drawn tight against the cold air that had blown in through the open door, was... awkward.
How had he missed the fact that she was topless when he and Tony had first collapsed into the cabin?
Tony had been so still on the floor, as white and cold as that boy in France, and he'd been so tired. Was still so tired...
Steve blinked, forcing himself fully awake, and the world lurched back into focus.
"I've already seen you naked." Tony's voice was slow, and a little slurred, making him sound faintly drunk. "Don is a doctor, and Steve's enough of a boyscout that he probably didn't even look."
"That's very helpful, Tony." Jan patted Tony's arm, her fingers brushing against Steve's skin.
Tony was shivering harder now, his body wracked with shudders violent enough to make Steve shake along with him – or maybe that was his own body, still trying to warm itself back up. "Everyone's seen me naked." Steve could hear Tony's teeth chattering, but the words themselves were still unconcerned. "Mostly naked."
"And we're all very glad you're wearing actual underwear this time." Don's voice in his ear again. His breath burned against Steve's skin, painfully hot. Steve breathed in through his nose and tried to ignore the way his ears, hands, and feet were throbbing in time to his heartbeat.
That was good, he reminded himself. It meant blood was flowing back into them.
Jan yawned. "Even in underwear, it was a pretty nice view," she said, too much tiredness in her tone for it to actually be flirtatious. "Cap might be a boy scout, but I was never a girl scout. And considering how cold Cap was when Don helped strip his clothes off him," this slightly louder, so that Steve couldn't miss it even with Tony lying between them, "I have to say, I am extremely impressed."
Steve's ears and face were burning enough already from the cold that blushing was superfluous. Having Jan announce that in mildly amused tones, with Don and Tony right there listening – even if Tony wasn't entirely coherent at the moment – wasn't at all the same as having Sharon say it while backing him against a wall, unconscious HYDRA agents littering the floor around them and fifteen minutes to kill before they had to meet back up with Fury and Sam.
"Very nice view," Tony agreed vaguely.
Okay, now that was just unfair. Lying mostly naked under a blanket wrapped around a mostly-naked Tony was a form of subtle torture that rivaled the throbbing in his slowly-thawing feet. Lying wrapped around a naked Tony who was coming on to him was more than any man ought to be expected to endure.
His body still considered getting warm a much higher priority than sex, though. Even with the heavy weight of the blankets over them trapping Don and Jan's body heat, the cold hadn't left his bones. It was going to take more than a few hours of warmth to drive it away.
Steve held onto to Tony more tightly – for warmth, holding him for warmth was completely acceptable – and tried not to think about ice and explosions and Bucky dying. His was so tired that he felt almost as if he were floating, his eyes sliding shut again of their own accord.
"You didn't see anything," he told Tony, focusing on the act of speaking to keep himself awake.
Tony sighed, shifting closer until his head was resting against Steve's shoulder, the tip of his nose a small spot of ice against Steve's neck. "No," he said indistinctly, sounding as if he found this deeply unfair. He was quiet for a long moment after that, and Steve started to suspect that he'd fallen asleep, until he spoke again, the dreamy note in his voice replaced by strain, "God, my hands. My feet. m'I going to lose anything?"
"We'll have to wait and see, but I don't think so." Don sounded confident, not like a man handing out empty reassurances, and Steve felt something within himself relax.
Tony's hands were too important to suffer permanent damage. Everything he did, from typing arcane commands into a computer keyboard to adjusting minuscule bits of circuitry, depended on the dexterity in those long, clever fingers. In his own way, he was a kind of artist.
Tony swore softly, the sound halfway to a moan, then mumbled, "I'll build... cyborg hands..." the words trailing off into deep, even breathing.
Tony's head was heavy against his shoulder, his mustache prickly. He was still shivering, but less violently now, and Steve felt something inappropriately like protectiveness as his shifted closer, trying to burrow into Steve.
When he'd tried to convince Steve to leave him behind in the snow, Tony had said that he loved him. The idea was both comforting and painful, like the pulsing heat in Steve's fingers and toes. Tony had given up, if only for a few moments, and that wasn't right. It wasn't like the man Steve knew, who'd fought his way out of imprisonment, refused to acknowledge his failing heart, and argued with Steve over how to handle supervillain after supervillain. Tony was a little too fond of expediency, and it was disconcerting to see him apply that to himself.
And he'd told Steve he loved him. Tonywasn't given to sappy displays of emotion – at least, not when he wasn't hiding behind Iron Man's helmet. He must have been barely coherent, or truly believed that they were about to die.
Hearing it shouldn't have been a surprise – in a lot of ways his teammates and friends were his family, and if pressed, Steve would have admitted that he loved them all. Thor's solid dignity and enthusiasm in a fight, Wanda's determination, Jan's good humor and surprising flashes of practicality, Vision's careful logic, Clint's brash confidence and his grin that sometimes reminded Steve of Bucky. Sam's willingness to point out whenever Steve was being an idiot, and the way he shared Steve's sense of humor, and had his own strong sense of right and wrong.
Tony... Tony was different. At some point, he'd become more than just a friend and teammate. Hearing him acknowledge even a part of that feeling in return was...
Was too complicated to think about right now. Like Tony's frozen nose against his neck and his legs tangled with Steve's, it should have been awkward or uncomfortable. Right now, though, he was warm and safe, and his team was safe, and he didn't want to move.
He could hear Jan and Don talking quietly, the slightly embarrassed jokes replaced by something more serious, but the words had begun fading in and out. Something about whether Tony's armor could be found and if it would still have a functioning communicator in it. Steve thought about telling them that it did, but the intent didn't quite make it into words.
"-bottom of a river, for all we know," Jan said, and that was the last thing he heard.
* * *
Tony woke up with Steve's arms wrapped around him, his face pressed into Steve's neck and Steve's legs tangled with his. He could feel Jan lying against his back, one of her small, cold feet tucked against his calf muscle. His hands and feet throbbed, and he had only vague memories of everything that had happened after falling into the river. Somehow, Steve must have gotten them to the cabin.
He remembered crawling out of the water, remembered stumbling through the snow, a handful of fuzzy snapshots of bone-numbing cold and exhaustion, and then a vague impression of heat, and his hands and feet burning. There had been an explosion, and an avalanche, and-
He wasn't wearing anything but his underwear, and neither was Steve. And while he couldn't remember much else from the previous night, he distinctly remembered the feel of naked female breasts pressed against his back.
Tony opened his eyes to a blurred impression of wind-burned skin and blond stubble. He'd been drooling onto Steve's neck, the side of his face mashed into Steve's collarbone.
There went one more chance to impress Steve. Tony usually considered it a point of pride to make sure that everyone he shared a bed with went away well satisfied. Passing out on Captain America and drooling all over him was not what he'd had in planned in the event that he ever got lucky enough to have Steve in his bed.
He might as well salvage what was left of the situation, preferably by disentangling himself from Steve before certain portions of his anatomy woke up the rest of the way. Steve's leg thrust between his and his hand on Tony's back were stimulation enough that he was already half-hard, and from the toes poking him in the back of the leg and the tousled blond head he could see over Steve's shoulder, they had company.
Pulling away and rolling onto his back hurt, every muscle in his body protesting at a night spent on the floor on top of the battering he'd received the previous day. Tony groaned, and pulled a hand out from under the blankets to rub at his eyes.
That had been a mistake, he decided, hissing through his teeth as pain jolted through his hands.
His fingers were bandaged, wrapped loosely in what looked like standard first aid kit gauze. Underneath it, they felt swollen and sore, as if they were twice their normal size.
The thought of what might be under those bandages wilted his half-formed erection almost instantly. Visions of blackened fingertips and dead skin sloughing away from flesh flashed vividly in his mind's eye, and he lifted his left wrist to his mouth, tugging at the edge of the bandage with his teeth.
Steve's hand closed around his wrist almost too quickly for Tony to track the movement.
"I thought you were asleep." His throat felt raw, the words coming out in a croak.
"I was." Steve pushed himself up onto his elbow, letting go of Tony's wrist to rub at his face. "Then you moved." His fingers were bandaged, too, and Tony's stomach lurched at the angry-looking red skin visible at the edges of the white gauze. How mangled were his hands, under those bandages? Steve was an artist; he'd hate losing any sensation or range of motion to frostbite.
There was a groan from his left, and then Jan's head emerged from beneath the blankets, her hair tangled from sleep. "I hate sleeping on the ground," she muttered, rubbing at her eyes with both hands and causing the blanket to slip interestingly low across her chest. "And I smell. Why couldn't this place have a shower?"
"Does it have food?" Steve sounded almost cheerful, freakishly so for a man who'd spent half the night on the floor of a shack after almost freezing to death.
"No." Jan shook her head, then leaned over to peer at Tony. "You look much better than you did last night. How are your feet?"
"Don't ask." Tony thought about crawling out from under the blankets to check on them, then rejected the idea. Considering how much just moving his fingers had hurt, getting up and walking was going to be... unpleasant. His feet had taken more of a battering than his hands. Putting his weight on them was probably not a good idea.
Getting up and walking was going to be unavoidable eventually, though. Did this cabin have a bathroom, or were they going to be reduced to going outside to find a convenient snowdrift?
"How long have we been here?" he asked.
"A few hours?" Steve said, sounding less than certain.
"Overnight, I think." Jan nodded at the cabin's small window, where a thin grey light was filtering in through a screen of snow. She turned her back to them and slid out from under the blanket, revealing black underwear and a lot of bare skin. The light wasn't bright enough to see the scar under her shoulder blade, courtesy of Count Nefaria's bullet, but that and the tiny red birthmark on her the back of her left hip were about the only things that weren't visible.
She reached for her costume, which lay spread out on the floor in front of the stove, and Steve dug his elbow into Tony's side.
Tony turned away, dropping his eyes back down to his hands to give her some privacy, and then wished he hadn't. "Your hands-" he began, gesturing carefully at Steve.
"They're all right." Steve's lips curved slightly. "In better shape than yours, anyway."
Beyond Steve, the lump of blankets that Tony assumed was Don Blake – it was too small to be Thor – twitched slightly. "Will you three be quiet? I'm trying to sleep."
"Sorry," Steve apologized.
There was a brief pause, and then Don rolled over, grimacing, and blinked blearily at them. "How do you feel?"
"Fine." The reply was automatic. And compared to the way he remembered feeling earlier, it was even true. He might be stiff and in pain and possibly frostbitten, but that was better than dying in the snow.
"Much better," Steve said.
Don squinted at him, then at Tony, the look in his eyes considering. "I should check your hands and feet for proper blood-flow."
"Tony first. Then we need to start thinking about how we're going to get out of here."
"I don't suppose either of you has a working communicator?" Jan asked, without turning around.
"Sorry," Steve said. "I lost mine in the avalanche, and Tony's is at the bottom of a river."
"I got through to the Scarlet Witch before I lost it, but the transmission was cut off by interference from the storm." And any chance to contact her again was sitting under several feet of water now.
A little of the slump left Jan's shoulders. "At least the rest of the team knows something's wrong, then. They'll be looking for us." She was zipping up the back of her costume, pulling the zipper all the way from the small of her back to the base of her neck with a fluid ease that Tony could only envy. He had bruised something in his left shoulder during the avalanche, or maybe pulled it – at this rate, he was going to be a wreck before he hit thirty. Even more of a wreck, that was.
It would still be better than not living to see thirty.
"It's a very big mountain," Don pointed out. He sounded somewhere between dry and apologetic, as if he wanted to let himself be hopeful but couldn't quite manage it. Apparently Thor had gotten the lion's share of the optimism in that relationship.
"We could go get my armor out of the river," Tony suggested, only half seriously. "The electronics are designed to survive immersion in water."
Steve shook his head, the movement sharp and decisive. "I don't think more wandering around in the snow is a good idea."
"It's about the fastest way to ensure that one of you permanently damages your hands or feet. Refreezing them is the last thing you want to do." Don was sitting up now, rubbing at his knee with one hand; he looked nearly as tired as Tony felt.
Tony's hands and feet returning to being numb with cold would actually have felt very good at the moment, but this was Don's field, and if he believed that there was a risk Tony could destroy his hands by going back out into the snow, then rescuing his armor would have to be an emergency measure only. No matter how uneasy the thought of it sitting unprotected on the bottom of a stream bed made him.
A drink would have been really nice about now, just one or two to take the edge off the throbbing in his fingers and make ignoring the thought of his armor falling into someone else's hands easier.
Mixing hypothermia and frostbite with alcohol was seven kinds of stupidity, Tony reminded himself. Even if he wasn't trying to go cold turkey, he wouldn't have been able to drink anything right now.
Don levered himself up, visibly wincing as he got to his feet. Spending the night on the floor after the battering they'd all taken yesterday was probably the last thing his leg had needed. Tony carefully didn't watch him as he limped over to collect his clothes, remembering how the constant concerned looks he'd gotten while recovering from heart surgery had grated.
He should probably get dressed as well. At the very least, he should get out from under the blanket and away from Steve, before he gave into the temptation to just lie back down and wrap himself around Steve's mostly naked and deliciously warm body again.
Tony settled for pulling one foot out from under the blanket and examining it. It was swathed in bandages from toes to ankle, the gauze pulled tight across his skin; either Don had decided to wrap him up as if he were stabilizing a sprained ankle, or his foot was swollen under there. Probably the latter.
Clear fluid had seeped through the bandaging in a few places, and there was a spot of blood over his heel. He didn't remember stepping on anything sharp, but last night had turned into a blur of cold and exhaustion long before they'd reached the cabin.
The skin on the back of his neck began to prickle with the feeling of being watched, and Tony looked up to find Steve frowning at him.
"We should wait here for help to arrive," Steve said, tone indicating that it wasn't a suggestion. "Like Don said, it's a big mountain, but this cabin is one of the first places Wanda and Vision will look." He started to rub a hand through his hair, winced, and carefully lowered the hand to his lap again. "You should lie down again," he told Tony, voice softening from confident command to something less certain. "We'll probably be here a while, and you need the rest."
The temptation to argue was immediate, but Tony settled for simply shrugging and pulling the blanket up over his legs again. Steve had to be just as tired as he was – he looked it, his lips cracked and his eyes smudged with bruised-looking shadows. "Is my shirt dry?"
Jan leaned down and picked it up, running the fabric through her hands for a moment before tossing it to him. "It feels dry."
It also felt warm, though the thin fabric would lose its heat fast now that it was away from the fire. Tony shrugged into it, then spent a long moment staring down at the row of buttons, acutely aware of how stiff his fingers were. An open shirt was better than no shirt, he decided, and let it go.
Then he drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and got to his feet to go make use of the cabin's facilities.
Walking sent stabbing pains through his feet with every step, and by the time he was lowering himself back down into the nest of blankets again, there was sweat prickling along his spine.
He and Steve had walked for over a mile yesterday, possibly several miles, with Steve half-carrying his dead weight by the end of it. In retrospect, he wasn't sure how they had done it.
"You should get some more rest, too," Tony said.
Steve was pulling his pants back on, his jaw tightening every time he had to shift all of his weight to one foot. The blue leather was sticking to his skin in a way that suggested that it was still damp, and wrestling it on seemed to take most of Steve's concentration. It left Tony free to watch him, so even though he personally would have let the costume dry more thoroughly before putting it back on, he refrained from pointing that out. Even if he'd mentioned it, Steve wasn't likely to choose sitting around naked over clothing when clothing was an option.
"You know," Jan observed, when Steve had finished fastening his belt and come to sit by her in front of the wood stove, "there's a reason none of my costumes have ever involved leather."
"You put Hank in that Goliath outfit with the leather bondage straps across his chest." The words felt awkward in Tony's mouth, and he immediately wished he hadn't said them. He must still be more out of it than he thought if he was bringing up Hank.
They didn't talk about Hank anymore, not to Jan. Even during his brief, two-week fling with her, Tony had tried to mention him as little as possible.
They should have noticed that something was wrong. It shouldn't have taken Jan's black eye and a disastrous fight that nearly got half the team killed to get them to finally realize that something had been deeply wrong with Hank.
The Avengers had promised not to interfere in one another's personal lives. It was an attempt at protecting one another's privacy that Tony had capitalized on more than once, when he'd been trying to manage his heart problems and conceal his identity as Tony Stark, but sometimes it meant that they missed things they shouldn't have.
At least they'd also failed to notice his drinking. The fact that he had apparently managed to keep it from affecting his performance as Iron Man had been one of the few things that had let him keep some sliver of self-respect after Bethany had finished knocking sense back into him. A few more months without her intervention, and he could have ended up as much of a danger to his teammates as Hank had, and without even the excuse of scrambled brain chemistry.
"I was young and foolish," Jan said, the humor leaving her voice.
There was an awkward pause, and then Steve said, just a little too brightly, "I think it's stopped snowing."
Subtlety was not always one of Steve's strong points.
Tony drew in a breath to point out that the smoke from the cabin's wood stove wouldn't be visible from the quinjet unless the ceiling raised itself at least a thousand feet and found himself yawning instead. His entire body still ached, his hands and feet throbbing a hot counterpoint to the dull pain of bruises and stiff muscles. He'd felt less battered after hours' worth of fighting the Mandarin or Titanium Man.
And he had had the protection of the armor when the snow had hit him. The others hadn't had that luxury.
Falling into that stream had been an unforgivably stupid mistake. If he hadn't been forced to discard his armor, he could be working on rewiring the circuitry and repairing the jet boots right now. Tony could have flown the rest of the team out himself, one at a time, with no need to wait for Vision and Wanda to show up and rescue them. And Steve wouldn't be facing possible damage to his fingers. Neither would Tony, for that matter.
"The ceiling's too low for them to spot us from the air unless they're scanning for heat sources." Tony yawned again, and forced himself to sit up a little straighter. "If I had any part of my armor, I could set up some kind of beacon, but as it is..." He let the words trail off. Pointing out what his clumsy dive into the water had cost them wasn't necessary; the others all knew it as well as he did.
Don looked up from the coffee mug he had been staring into and frowned at Tony. "We are not going back out and getting your armor."
"I didn't suggest it." Being half-frozen hadn't removed his common sense – pin-pointing the exact spot where he'd lost the armor would be next to impossible without proper equipment. There was no way of knowing how long he and Steve had wandered around after they had crawled out of the water, or how many circles they'd walked in.
Not too many – Steve would have kept them going in a far straighter line than most people would have been able to manage – but it was cold outside and warm in here, and none of them were in immediate danger.
His armor could wait. He wasn't going to risk his teammates' well-being over it. Doom wasn't likely to be out there looking for it right now, not when the storm had only just ended.
The others were still talking, he realized abruptly, as Steve's voice said his name.
"Tony?"
"Sorry," he apologized. "What were you saying?"
"Lie back down before you fall over." Steve smiled at him, a familiar grin that warmed something inside Tony even though he could see the strain still lurking around Steve's eyes. He sounded affectionate, even slightly amused. It was a tone Steve had used with Iron Man often, but only rarely with Tony Stark.
Most of the previous night post-stream disaster was a blur, but Tony distinctly remembered asking Steve to leave him. Only the knowledge that he was slowing Steve down had gotten him back to his feet the first few times he had fallen, and even that source of energy had eventually run out. If it hadn't been for Steve's overwhelming stubbornness...
It reminded him of Bethany, in a way, or maybe Bethany had reminded him of Steve. Both of them had saved him. Neither of them would have had room for him in their life.
It was unfair for Steve to smile at him that way without the armor between them.
The floor felt slightly softer this time around; Tony closed his eyes, and didn't bother to protest when Jan made a snide comment to the effect that he clearly must be tired if he was willing to follow advice.
He'd started to drift off, almost everything but Steve's presence just beside him slowly fading out of his awareness, when he heard the distinct whine of a quinjet's double engines.
* * *
It was warm in the quinjet, and despite the fact that it was substantially brighter than the cabin, Steve was half-asleep within minutes of taking off. All he wanted to do was close his eyes and sink into the padded quinjet seat; instead he forced himself awake, glancing around the cabin to check on his teammates.
Tony was slumped in his seat, eyes closed, a thermos of hot cocoa cradled loosely between his hands. He'd been only half-awake when they'd stumbled into the quinjet, barely moving under his own power and groggily insisting that they get his armor back before they left the mountain. Steve had tried to take some of his weight, but then Vision had appeared on Tony's other side and told Steve that he had Tony, and Steve should concentrate on helping himself right now. "You're injured," he'd said. "Let me help him," and Steve had, reluctantly, obeyed.
Jan looked equally exhausted, huddling in a blanket and staring silently into space with the dazed look of someone who'd pushed herself past her limits.
Don was leaning forward in his seat, elbows on his knees, and arguing the logistics of fetching Thor's hammer out of the ravine with the back of Vision's head. Fetching the Iron Man armor had been easy, a simple matter of pinpointing it with the quinjet's instruments and sending Vision down to rescue it from the water. Retrieving Mjolnir sounded like it was going to be something of a problem.
"You're going to have to get me down to it somehow. No one else can lift it."
"The bottom of the ravine is too uneven for the quinjet to land safely." Vision sounded unruffled and slightly detached, as he almost always did. "I'll have to fly you down myself."
"Yeah, I thought so." Don grimaced. "I hate having other people fly me around – no offense, Vision." He sighed, looking tired and worn-down. "Sorry about this. If I hadn't dropped it down the ravine in the first place, Thor would have been able to get himself and Jan safely out of the blizzard, and probably been able to rescue Cap and Tony, too."
Assigning blame after the fact wasn't going to do anyone any good, especially when it was needless blame. "I saw Thor grab for Jan just before the avalanche hit," Steve said. "Neither of you had a chance to get the hammer back."
Don shrugged, looking only partly mollified. "I could have kept a better grip on it in the first place."
"And I could have not blown us up." Tony spoke without opening his eyes, the words slow and distant.
"And Doom could have decided not to be an egocentric psychopath in an ugly mask," Jan added tartly.
"No, egocentric psychopath is his core personality." Wanda twisted in the copilot's seat to look back over her shoulder at them. "We're just inside the Transian border. In this part of the mountains, it's not surprising you had bad luck all around. This part of the Carpathians is supposed to be cursed; it's probably why Doom chose to perform his ritual here."
They should have brought Wanda with them, Steve thought absently. She knew more about magic and rituals than anyone else currently on the Avengers, and she knew the area. "At least we stopped him," he observed. "Things could have gone a lot worse." On the other hand, if Wanda had come with them, there would have been no one who knew the area to help rescue them. Vision might not have been able to find them on his own.
"Indeed they could have," Vision agreed. "We were afraid the worst had happened when we lost your distress signal in the storm. I'm sorry we couldn't get here sooner."
"We're just glad you got here. We would have been in real trouble if you hadn't shown up." Steve let his head fall back against the back of his seat, and stared up at the quinjet's metal ceiling. There was a line of rivets directly overhead, and a bundle of coated wiring that branched off into a half-dozen smaller tributaries, each leading to a different piece of instrumentation. Tony must have been re-wiring or overhauling the plane's systems before they'd left; the guts of the quinjet weren't usually visible like this.
There was quiet for a while, broken only by the soothing drone of the engines. Tony gradually slumped further down in his seat, his breathing slowing into the even rhythm of sleep.
Across the aisle from Steve, Don was dozing as well. Jan had shrunken down and flown forward, probably moving just for the sake of keeping herself awake, and was now perched on the back of Wanda's chair, speaking to her and Vision in low tones. Steve couldn't make out what they were saying beyond the occasional word, but he wasn't really listening. It was nice to let someone else take charge for a change.
His head buzzed with exhaustion, but every time he started to fall asleep, the slow throb in his fingers and toes pulled him back. It was a wonder that Tony was able to sleep so deeply; his hands and feet were in worse shape than Steve's, including one gash on his heel that Don had predicted would need stitches.
Had he imagined it, or had Tony been half flirting with him last night? All those comments about liking Steve naked, and the unfairness of not getting a good look at him – Tony hadn't been coherent enough to make jokes, not at that stage of punch-drunk exhaustion.
He'd heard rumors that Tony Stark's love life occasionally included men, but Steve had always dismissed that as made-up celebrity gossip. It wasn't like there was a dearth of that when it came to Tony, and rumors of bisexuality seemed to be almost standard for the supposedly debauched rich and famous these days. Some things, it seemed, didn't change with time.
The fact that Tony – that Iron Man – might return his interest wasn't a possibility he'd ever seriously contemplated.
In some ways, it had been much less complicated when Steve hadn't known who was behind Iron Man's helmet, when he'd still been safely unattainable. Tony Stark was frighteningly breakable, capable of being hurt in ways a faceless suit of armor wasn't. He drank too much, or at least, he had, and slept with his own teammates while lying to them about who he was, and was entirely too cavalier about both his safety and other people's feelings.
He was also stubbornly brave, more brilliant with machines than anyone else Steve had ever known, and...
The plane banked sharply to the left, jerking Steve out of the light doze he had drifted in to. Vision must be taking them down to hover in the ravine.
Another twenty minutes or so, and they'd be on their way out of here and back home, where Tony could get his feet seen to and Steve could sleep for a week.
They'd earned it. The aftermath of the mission might have been an unqualified disaster, but they had at least stopped Doom. And kept one another from dying.
He hadn't lost anyone this time, despite coming far too close to it.
Tony ought to have known there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that Steve would leave him behind – anymore than Tony himself would have left a friend to die. More than a friend; even without the armor, Tony was still Iron Man, still the same man whose voice was the first thing Steve had heard when he'd come out of the ice. His knight in shining armor, whose frustrating dedication to Tony Stark had always been a continual source of jealousy.
Maybe he hadn't dismissed those rumors as completely as he'd tried to tell himself he had.
If they were true, if Tony really was a fellow queer, then all those fantasies about Tony sweaty and shirtless and smeared with machine oil, and all that hopeless crushing on Iron Man might not be quite so hopeless. Not that Sharon potentially returning his interest had made approaching her any easier, but considering that he'd actually made a floundering attempt at starting a relationship with her, well, he was getting better at it. He'd never gotten up the courage to try anything with Betsy, back during the war, and she'd been a good friend.
Tony cared about him as a friend, too, and unlike Betsy, seemed to actually be attracted to him, and that was a good basis for a relationship, wasn't it? And he was getting ahead of himself now. First, maybe he ought to start by with flirting back.
Later. After they got back to New York, and his hands and feet stopped throbbing and itching so much. And after that pale, bruised look left Tony's face.
For now, he was going to close his eyes and let Wanda and Vision take them home.
***
Part One | Part Two | Part Three
Authors:
seanchai and elspethdixonUniverse: 616
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Beta: None
Summary: The Avengers are stranded in the snowy Transian mountains. Pre-slash cliché-fic originally written for hc_bingo’s “hypothermia/exposure” prompt.
Word Count: 20,382
Authors’ note: This is set just after the red thong incident where Tony's identity as Iron Man was revealed to the rest of the team. Thanks to the beauty of the Marvel telescoping timeline, we’ve decided that it’s taking place in the early 2000s rather than the 70s.
The door flew open, rebounding off the opposite wall with a slam, and cold air rushed into the room. Jan jumped to her feet, dragging the blanket with her, just as Cap and Tony literally fell through the door.
Filled with relief – they weren't dead, they were here, the avalanche hadn't killed them – she lunged past them to shut the door. Being happy they were alive didn't mean she was willing to let what little warmth she and Don had managed to find escape. The wind fought her, and it took throwing all her bodyweight against the door to force it closed.
Jan sagged against it for a moment, exhaustion seeping in now that the nagging worry over Cap and Tony's whereabouts was gone. When she drew herself up and turned around again, the worry came rushing back.
Tony and Cap were lying motionless on the floor, covered in snow. There was no sign of the Iron Man armor; both of them were bareheaded, Tony clad only in trousers and shirtsleeves, and Cap's cowl nowhere in evidence. Don was already kneeling next to them, one hand on Cap's shoulder.
"You made it," he was saying. "We were hoping the two of you had flown away to get help, but frankly I'm just glad you're alive. What happened to you?"
Cap lifted his head a little, blinking tiredly at Don. "There was an explosion," he said hoarsely, voice thick with exhaustion. "I got Tony out of the water, but we couldn't find anyone else." He shook his head, as if trying to force himself back to alertness; his hair was stiff with ice. "I need to go back out. We still have men out--." He shoved himself up to his hands and knees, then broke off abruptly and knelt there, swaying, head down.
Don took him by the shoulder again, steadying him. "Steve," he said, gently, "do you know what year it is?"
Cap's head snapped up, and he stared at Don blankly, a look of vague horror on his face. "The future?" His voice wavered slightly on the word. Then he blinked, a little more awareness seeping into his eyes, and frowned. "But... you're not any older. I don't-" Then he smiled, sagging back against Tony in relief. "Don. We found you. Is Jan here?"
Jan stepped away from the door, into his line of sight. "Yes," she said. "I'm here. And that was mean, Don."
"He sounded disoriented," Don said. "I wanted to make sure he wasn't having some kind of flashback."
"I haven't had those in years," Cap muttered, sounding slightly sullen. He wrapped an arm around Tony again, curling his body protectively around him.
Tony still hadn't moved. He was dead white with cold, his lips blue and his hair as thick with ice as Cap's was. If they'd really fallen into water somehow – God, they were lucky to still be alive.
Tony was alive, right?
As if he'd read her mind, Don leaned across Cap and pressed two fingers to Tony's throat searching for a pulse. After a long, tense moment, he nodded, and Jan let out a slow breath of relief.
"We need to get their clothes off," Don said, meeting her eyes over Cap's head. "Get them a little closer to the fire."
The last time Jan had stripped Tony Stark's clothing off, it had been under far more pleasant and entertaining circumstances. For one thing, he'd been an active participant, rather than lying frighteningly limp while she tried to wrestle clothing off his overly-long limbs. For another, undressing Tony in order to have outstanding but surprisingly vanilla sex with him hadn't involved talking an only partially coherent Cap into letting go of him first.
"You're safe now," Don was saying, in a calm, authoritative tone that they probably taught you in med school. "You got both of you here safely, and now you need to let us help Tony, okay? We need to get those wet clothes off both of you."
Cap reluctantly uncurled from around Tony and sat up, watching intently as Jan unbuttoned Tony's shirt and struggled to get it off him as gently as possible.
"Careful of his fingers." Don eased Tony's socks off, first the left and then the right, slowly exposing his feet. There was a long, jagged cut across his left heel, and one of the toenails on his right foot was torn. Both injuries were bloodless, his socks barely even stained – was that good, or bad? "Don't try to rub them dry; there could be ice crystals in the tissue. That goes for you, too, Steve. No rubbing your hands or feet to try and warm them up."
Cap made an indistinct noise, neither agreement nor disagreement. He was pulling one of his gloves off with his teeth, eyes still fixed on Tony. "He needs his fingers," he said, spitting out the glove. "You can't let them turn black and fall off." It had the sound of an order.
Don pressed a finger against the sole of Tony's foot, then did the same thing to each of his toes. "There's still some resilience. I don't think he's going to lose his feet, though he might want to when they start thawing out." He frowned at Cap, who was now tugging ineffectually at one boot. "Stop that. Give me your foot and let me help you."
By the time Jan had Tony down to his underwear, Don and Cap were still peeling damp, frozen leather off Cap's body. Beneath his costume, his skin was almost as pale as Tony's, and he swayed visibly when Don hauled him to his feet to strip his pants off, bracing himself against the wall.
If someone had told her, prior to today, that she'd get the chance to see Cap without those tight leather pants and wouldn't enjoy it in the slightest, she... would probably have believed them, actually. Over the years, she'd found that being a superhero offered a distressingly wide variety of unpleasant experiences involving nudity.
"We need to dump the coffee out and start heating some water," Don said, as he eased Steve to the floor a few yards away from the stove. "We can soak cloths in it and use them to warm their hands, feet, and faces."
Cap shook his head. "Mine are fine. Tony needs-"
"You are not fine," Don said firmly. "Just because you miraculously survived being frozen once doesn't mean you're immune to frostbite and hypothermia. Your balance and coordination are compromised, you're shaking, and you've been walking through the snow for God knows how long in wet boots." He turned back to Jan. "We need to get both of them warm now. Help me get Tony closer to the stove, and then I'll start heating the water."
The two of them half-dragged, half-carried Tony across the cabin to lay him down next to Cap, with one blanket between them and the floor, and another spread over them. It seemed pitifully inadequate, given Tony's still, cold pallor and Steve's convulsive shudders and chattering teeth.
When she said so, Don nodded. "They don't have enough body heat left to warm themselves back up." He kept pumping water into their saucepan as he spoke, the pump handle moving easily. Maybe she had loosened it up for him. "Cap might be all right with just blankets, something hot to drink and first aid for frostbite, but I wouldn't rely on it, especially not out here with no way to get help if he gets worse. And Tony..." he trailed off, glancing at Cap, and lowered his voice. "Severe hypothermia can cause cardiac arrhythmia. If we don't get his core temperature back up, he could be in a lot of trouble."
Cap had curled around Tony again, oblivious to the discussion – his eyes were half lidded, and Jan suspected he was only partially awake. He'd seemed mostly coherent earlier, but he also didn't seem to have noticed Jan's state of undress, something that would normally have gotten a blush and an averted gaze.
And Tony...
'A lot of trouble' was probably an understatement.
"We're going to have to get under the blankets with them," she said. She and Don were the only heat sources in the cabin other than the stove, which made laying together for warmth the only viable option. "I'll take Tony." If she was going to be cuddling mostly-naked with one of her male teammates, it might as well be someone she'd already slept with. "You take Cap."
"We'll put them between us." Don let go of the pump handle and picked up the full pan of water. The cabin was small enough that it only took a handful of uneven steps for him to return to the stove, and the pan went back onto the stovetop, hissing as the water that had splashed down the sides hit the hot metal and evaporated away.
Jan glanced from the stove, where the water was going to take at least ten minutes to boil, to where her teammates lay huddled in a nest of blankets. "And we thought sitting around naked together was awkward," she muttered. "Hank is going to flip out when he hears about this."
Then she winced, realizing what she'd said. She didn't care how Hank might have felt about it, Jan reminded herself. She was through with Hank, and his excuses and insecurities and nasty habit of lashing out at people, mainly her.
Don, thankfully, said nothing. He lowered himself to one knee, then to the floor, to slide under the blanket next to Cap; he was putting almost no weight on his bad leg, Jan saw, and she felt a brief flash of guilt for letting him help her haul Tony and Cap around. He'd been through an avalanche, walked almost a mile through the snow, and now he was going to be sleeping on a hard wooden floor.
They couldn't do anything about it, though, and she doubted he would appreciate her sympathy, any more than she would have appreciated his.
Tony's skin was ice cold against hers when she crawled under the blanket, and she had to fight the urge to flinch back from him, making herself press her feet against his freezing ones – carefully, remembering Don's warning about ice crystals – and wrap her arms around his torso.
There was still ice in his hair, bits of it melting and brushing cold water against her forehead when she pressed her face into the back of his neck.
Cap shifted his own grip on Tony slightly, mumbling something, and one of his hands brushed against her bare arm, a fresh jolt of cold that did make her flinch.
Jan closed her eyes, and started counting off the minutes it would take for the water to heat.
His hands and feet were starting to burn. The rest of him felt as if his muscles and bones had never completely thawed after he'd been chipped out of the ice, even Don's heat against his back not enough to do more than keep him from actively freezing, but the wet cloths Jan had just wrapped around his hands and feet were boiling hot.
And now Don was pressing new, even hotter ones against his ears.
They were probably just warm rather than actually hot, Steve knew, and the fact that he was regaining feeling in his extremities was a good thing.
A good thing that hurt like hell.
Had it been this bad the last time?
Maybe it was a small blessing that Tony was still unconscious. At least he'd be spared some of the pain as his frozen hands and feet came back to life.
Tony's face tensed, and he started to struggle weakly, one of his feet kicking Steve right in the shin. There was so little force behind the blow that it didn't even hurt, barely jarring his leg.
"No." Tony slammed his head back, the back of his skull smacking into Jan's cheekbone. "Let go."
Steve loosened his grip on Tony as much as he could without actually moving his arms – moving took effort – and forced words past chattering teeth. "S'just us. It's okay." He was shivering harder now than he'd been when they'd come in out of the cold, the muscles in his back tense and aching from what felt like hours' worth of shaking.
Tony's eyes opened, wide but unfocussed. "Burning won't work, I..." He shoved at Steve's chest with his free arm, the motion slow and uncoordinated. "...build it for you. I won't..."
"Tony," Jan said, through gritted teeth, "hold still." Just as Don said,
"If he keeps thrashing around, he's going to hurt himself," directly into Steve's ear.
"Tony," Steve tried again. "Iron Man. We're safe. We made it."
Tony went limp, and for a moment, Steve thought he'd passed out again. Alarm began forcing its way through the exhaustion hazing his thoughts, and then Tony said his name.
"Steve. We- we found the cabin."
He sounded as tired as Steve felt, the words low and hoarse. Steve let himself relax again, his eyes shutting almost by themselves. Tony was awake, and talking. He wasn't going to die. His heart wasn't going to give out from the shock of his body warming up again.
Steve hadn't lost anybody this time.
Don's hand reached over Steve's shoulder, feeling at the base of Tony's throat, probably for a pulse. Tony tried to twitch his head away, frowning again. There was a vague kind of confusion on his face that just looked... wrong on Tony.
"Where's my... we left the armor. We have to go get it. Doom is out there and-" He thrashed weakly for a moment, trying to get up, then collapsed back against Steve's chest. "Have to go and get it," he repeated, a disturbing edge of hysteria in his voice.
"We will." Don's baritone voice was soothing, but firm. "Right now, you're going to lie there and get warm again." It was the way paramedics spoke to accident victims, the way Steve himself tried to sound whenever the Avengers or he and Sam rescued people from disasters or burning buildings.
It occurred to him that he was just lying there and letting Don take charge. A civilian, for all that he was associated with the Avengers and somehow the same person as Thor. He shouldn't just lie there while a civilian did his job.
"We'll go back for it later," he promised. "And stop trying to break Jan's nose."
Tony stopped struggling. "Later," he echoed. "I'll... hold you to that." Then, "Jan?" He rolled his head back, looking over his shoulder at Jan. "You're naked," he said, sounding vaguely pleased and significantly calmer. "And so is Steve. I like this cabin."
Fabric rustled as Jan shifted. "You know," she sighed, "if someone had told me yesterday that I'd spend tonight naked in bed with three men, this is not how I would have imagined it. I would have pictured something a lot less embarrassing."
Somehow, the fact that he was effectively naked in the same 'bed' as one of his female teammates had not occurred to Steve until that moment. Trying to not jar Tony, he pulled his legs in closer to his body. Don's warm skin and Tony's chilled, clammy skin pressed against his own wasn't remotely erotic – Steve's body was too exhausted and frozen to respond even if he'd wanted it to – but the sudden memory of Jan's naked breasts, small and high, with nipples drawn tight against the cold air that had blown in through the open door, was... awkward.
How had he missed the fact that she was topless when he and Tony had first collapsed into the cabin?
Tony had been so still on the floor, as white and cold as that boy in France, and he'd been so tired. Was still so tired...
Steve blinked, forcing himself fully awake, and the world lurched back into focus.
"I've already seen you naked." Tony's voice was slow, and a little slurred, making him sound faintly drunk. "Don is a doctor, and Steve's enough of a boyscout that he probably didn't even look."
"That's very helpful, Tony." Jan patted Tony's arm, her fingers brushing against Steve's skin.
Tony was shivering harder now, his body wracked with shudders violent enough to make Steve shake along with him – or maybe that was his own body, still trying to warm itself back up. "Everyone's seen me naked." Steve could hear Tony's teeth chattering, but the words themselves were still unconcerned. "Mostly naked."
"And we're all very glad you're wearing actual underwear this time." Don's voice in his ear again. His breath burned against Steve's skin, painfully hot. Steve breathed in through his nose and tried to ignore the way his ears, hands, and feet were throbbing in time to his heartbeat.
That was good, he reminded himself. It meant blood was flowing back into them.
Jan yawned. "Even in underwear, it was a pretty nice view," she said, too much tiredness in her tone for it to actually be flirtatious. "Cap might be a boy scout, but I was never a girl scout. And considering how cold Cap was when Don helped strip his clothes off him," this slightly louder, so that Steve couldn't miss it even with Tony lying between them, "I have to say, I am extremely impressed."
Steve's ears and face were burning enough already from the cold that blushing was superfluous. Having Jan announce that in mildly amused tones, with Don and Tony right there listening – even if Tony wasn't entirely coherent at the moment – wasn't at all the same as having Sharon say it while backing him against a wall, unconscious HYDRA agents littering the floor around them and fifteen minutes to kill before they had to meet back up with Fury and Sam.
"Very nice view," Tony agreed vaguely.
Okay, now that was just unfair. Lying mostly naked under a blanket wrapped around a mostly-naked Tony was a form of subtle torture that rivaled the throbbing in his slowly-thawing feet. Lying wrapped around a naked Tony who was coming on to him was more than any man ought to be expected to endure.
His body still considered getting warm a much higher priority than sex, though. Even with the heavy weight of the blankets over them trapping Don and Jan's body heat, the cold hadn't left his bones. It was going to take more than a few hours of warmth to drive it away.
Steve held onto to Tony more tightly – for warmth, holding him for warmth was completely acceptable – and tried not to think about ice and explosions and Bucky dying. His was so tired that he felt almost as if he were floating, his eyes sliding shut again of their own accord.
"You didn't see anything," he told Tony, focusing on the act of speaking to keep himself awake.
Tony sighed, shifting closer until his head was resting against Steve's shoulder, the tip of his nose a small spot of ice against Steve's neck. "No," he said indistinctly, sounding as if he found this deeply unfair. He was quiet for a long moment after that, and Steve started to suspect that he'd fallen asleep, until he spoke again, the dreamy note in his voice replaced by strain, "God, my hands. My feet. m'I going to lose anything?"
"We'll have to wait and see, but I don't think so." Don sounded confident, not like a man handing out empty reassurances, and Steve felt something within himself relax.
Tony's hands were too important to suffer permanent damage. Everything he did, from typing arcane commands into a computer keyboard to adjusting minuscule bits of circuitry, depended on the dexterity in those long, clever fingers. In his own way, he was a kind of artist.
Tony swore softly, the sound halfway to a moan, then mumbled, "I'll build... cyborg hands..." the words trailing off into deep, even breathing.
Tony's head was heavy against his shoulder, his mustache prickly. He was still shivering, but less violently now, and Steve felt something inappropriately like protectiveness as his shifted closer, trying to burrow into Steve.
When he'd tried to convince Steve to leave him behind in the snow, Tony had said that he loved him. The idea was both comforting and painful, like the pulsing heat in Steve's fingers and toes. Tony had given up, if only for a few moments, and that wasn't right. It wasn't like the man Steve knew, who'd fought his way out of imprisonment, refused to acknowledge his failing heart, and argued with Steve over how to handle supervillain after supervillain. Tony was a little too fond of expediency, and it was disconcerting to see him apply that to himself.
And he'd told Steve he loved him. Tonywasn't given to sappy displays of emotion – at least, not when he wasn't hiding behind Iron Man's helmet. He must have been barely coherent, or truly believed that they were about to die.
Hearing it shouldn't have been a surprise – in a lot of ways his teammates and friends were his family, and if pressed, Steve would have admitted that he loved them all. Thor's solid dignity and enthusiasm in a fight, Wanda's determination, Jan's good humor and surprising flashes of practicality, Vision's careful logic, Clint's brash confidence and his grin that sometimes reminded Steve of Bucky. Sam's willingness to point out whenever Steve was being an idiot, and the way he shared Steve's sense of humor, and had his own strong sense of right and wrong.
Tony... Tony was different. At some point, he'd become more than just a friend and teammate. Hearing him acknowledge even a part of that feeling in return was...
Was too complicated to think about right now. Like Tony's frozen nose against his neck and his legs tangled with Steve's, it should have been awkward or uncomfortable. Right now, though, he was warm and safe, and his team was safe, and he didn't want to move.
He could hear Jan and Don talking quietly, the slightly embarrassed jokes replaced by something more serious, but the words had begun fading in and out. Something about whether Tony's armor could be found and if it would still have a functioning communicator in it. Steve thought about telling them that it did, but the intent didn't quite make it into words.
"-bottom of a river, for all we know," Jan said, and that was the last thing he heard.
Tony woke up with Steve's arms wrapped around him, his face pressed into Steve's neck and Steve's legs tangled with his. He could feel Jan lying against his back, one of her small, cold feet tucked against his calf muscle. His hands and feet throbbed, and he had only vague memories of everything that had happened after falling into the river. Somehow, Steve must have gotten them to the cabin.
He remembered crawling out of the water, remembered stumbling through the snow, a handful of fuzzy snapshots of bone-numbing cold and exhaustion, and then a vague impression of heat, and his hands and feet burning. There had been an explosion, and an avalanche, and-
He wasn't wearing anything but his underwear, and neither was Steve. And while he couldn't remember much else from the previous night, he distinctly remembered the feel of naked female breasts pressed against his back.
Tony opened his eyes to a blurred impression of wind-burned skin and blond stubble. He'd been drooling onto Steve's neck, the side of his face mashed into Steve's collarbone.
There went one more chance to impress Steve. Tony usually considered it a point of pride to make sure that everyone he shared a bed with went away well satisfied. Passing out on Captain America and drooling all over him was not what he'd had in planned in the event that he ever got lucky enough to have Steve in his bed.
He might as well salvage what was left of the situation, preferably by disentangling himself from Steve before certain portions of his anatomy woke up the rest of the way. Steve's leg thrust between his and his hand on Tony's back were stimulation enough that he was already half-hard, and from the toes poking him in the back of the leg and the tousled blond head he could see over Steve's shoulder, they had company.
Pulling away and rolling onto his back hurt, every muscle in his body protesting at a night spent on the floor on top of the battering he'd received the previous day. Tony groaned, and pulled a hand out from under the blankets to rub at his eyes.
That had been a mistake, he decided, hissing through his teeth as pain jolted through his hands.
His fingers were bandaged, wrapped loosely in what looked like standard first aid kit gauze. Underneath it, they felt swollen and sore, as if they were twice their normal size.
The thought of what might be under those bandages wilted his half-formed erection almost instantly. Visions of blackened fingertips and dead skin sloughing away from flesh flashed vividly in his mind's eye, and he lifted his left wrist to his mouth, tugging at the edge of the bandage with his teeth.
Steve's hand closed around his wrist almost too quickly for Tony to track the movement.
"I thought you were asleep." His throat felt raw, the words coming out in a croak.
"I was." Steve pushed himself up onto his elbow, letting go of Tony's wrist to rub at his face. "Then you moved." His fingers were bandaged, too, and Tony's stomach lurched at the angry-looking red skin visible at the edges of the white gauze. How mangled were his hands, under those bandages? Steve was an artist; he'd hate losing any sensation or range of motion to frostbite.
There was a groan from his left, and then Jan's head emerged from beneath the blankets, her hair tangled from sleep. "I hate sleeping on the ground," she muttered, rubbing at her eyes with both hands and causing the blanket to slip interestingly low across her chest. "And I smell. Why couldn't this place have a shower?"
"Does it have food?" Steve sounded almost cheerful, freakishly so for a man who'd spent half the night on the floor of a shack after almost freezing to death.
"No." Jan shook her head, then leaned over to peer at Tony. "You look much better than you did last night. How are your feet?"
"Don't ask." Tony thought about crawling out from under the blankets to check on them, then rejected the idea. Considering how much just moving his fingers had hurt, getting up and walking was going to be... unpleasant. His feet had taken more of a battering than his hands. Putting his weight on them was probably not a good idea.
Getting up and walking was going to be unavoidable eventually, though. Did this cabin have a bathroom, or were they going to be reduced to going outside to find a convenient snowdrift?
"How long have we been here?" he asked.
"A few hours?" Steve said, sounding less than certain.
"Overnight, I think." Jan nodded at the cabin's small window, where a thin grey light was filtering in through a screen of snow. She turned her back to them and slid out from under the blanket, revealing black underwear and a lot of bare skin. The light wasn't bright enough to see the scar under her shoulder blade, courtesy of Count Nefaria's bullet, but that and the tiny red birthmark on her the back of her left hip were about the only things that weren't visible.
She reached for her costume, which lay spread out on the floor in front of the stove, and Steve dug his elbow into Tony's side.
Tony turned away, dropping his eyes back down to his hands to give her some privacy, and then wished he hadn't. "Your hands-" he began, gesturing carefully at Steve.
"They're all right." Steve's lips curved slightly. "In better shape than yours, anyway."
Beyond Steve, the lump of blankets that Tony assumed was Don Blake – it was too small to be Thor – twitched slightly. "Will you three be quiet? I'm trying to sleep."
"Sorry," Steve apologized.
There was a brief pause, and then Don rolled over, grimacing, and blinked blearily at them. "How do you feel?"
"Fine." The reply was automatic. And compared to the way he remembered feeling earlier, it was even true. He might be stiff and in pain and possibly frostbitten, but that was better than dying in the snow.
"Much better," Steve said.
Don squinted at him, then at Tony, the look in his eyes considering. "I should check your hands and feet for proper blood-flow."
"Tony first. Then we need to start thinking about how we're going to get out of here."
"I don't suppose either of you has a working communicator?" Jan asked, without turning around.
"Sorry," Steve said. "I lost mine in the avalanche, and Tony's is at the bottom of a river."
"I got through to the Scarlet Witch before I lost it, but the transmission was cut off by interference from the storm." And any chance to contact her again was sitting under several feet of water now.
A little of the slump left Jan's shoulders. "At least the rest of the team knows something's wrong, then. They'll be looking for us." She was zipping up the back of her costume, pulling the zipper all the way from the small of her back to the base of her neck with a fluid ease that Tony could only envy. He had bruised something in his left shoulder during the avalanche, or maybe pulled it – at this rate, he was going to be a wreck before he hit thirty. Even more of a wreck, that was.
It would still be better than not living to see thirty.
"It's a very big mountain," Don pointed out. He sounded somewhere between dry and apologetic, as if he wanted to let himself be hopeful but couldn't quite manage it. Apparently Thor had gotten the lion's share of the optimism in that relationship.
"We could go get my armor out of the river," Tony suggested, only half seriously. "The electronics are designed to survive immersion in water."
Steve shook his head, the movement sharp and decisive. "I don't think more wandering around in the snow is a good idea."
"It's about the fastest way to ensure that one of you permanently damages your hands or feet. Refreezing them is the last thing you want to do." Don was sitting up now, rubbing at his knee with one hand; he looked nearly as tired as Tony felt.
Tony's hands and feet returning to being numb with cold would actually have felt very good at the moment, but this was Don's field, and if he believed that there was a risk Tony could destroy his hands by going back out into the snow, then rescuing his armor would have to be an emergency measure only. No matter how uneasy the thought of it sitting unprotected on the bottom of a stream bed made him.
A drink would have been really nice about now, just one or two to take the edge off the throbbing in his fingers and make ignoring the thought of his armor falling into someone else's hands easier.
Mixing hypothermia and frostbite with alcohol was seven kinds of stupidity, Tony reminded himself. Even if he wasn't trying to go cold turkey, he wouldn't have been able to drink anything right now.
Don levered himself up, visibly wincing as he got to his feet. Spending the night on the floor after the battering they'd all taken yesterday was probably the last thing his leg had needed. Tony carefully didn't watch him as he limped over to collect his clothes, remembering how the constant concerned looks he'd gotten while recovering from heart surgery had grated.
He should probably get dressed as well. At the very least, he should get out from under the blanket and away from Steve, before he gave into the temptation to just lie back down and wrap himself around Steve's mostly naked and deliciously warm body again.
Tony settled for pulling one foot out from under the blanket and examining it. It was swathed in bandages from toes to ankle, the gauze pulled tight across his skin; either Don had decided to wrap him up as if he were stabilizing a sprained ankle, or his foot was swollen under there. Probably the latter.
Clear fluid had seeped through the bandaging in a few places, and there was a spot of blood over his heel. He didn't remember stepping on anything sharp, but last night had turned into a blur of cold and exhaustion long before they'd reached the cabin.
The skin on the back of his neck began to prickle with the feeling of being watched, and Tony looked up to find Steve frowning at him.
"We should wait here for help to arrive," Steve said, tone indicating that it wasn't a suggestion. "Like Don said, it's a big mountain, but this cabin is one of the first places Wanda and Vision will look." He started to rub a hand through his hair, winced, and carefully lowered the hand to his lap again. "You should lie down again," he told Tony, voice softening from confident command to something less certain. "We'll probably be here a while, and you need the rest."
The temptation to argue was immediate, but Tony settled for simply shrugging and pulling the blanket up over his legs again. Steve had to be just as tired as he was – he looked it, his lips cracked and his eyes smudged with bruised-looking shadows. "Is my shirt dry?"
Jan leaned down and picked it up, running the fabric through her hands for a moment before tossing it to him. "It feels dry."
It also felt warm, though the thin fabric would lose its heat fast now that it was away from the fire. Tony shrugged into it, then spent a long moment staring down at the row of buttons, acutely aware of how stiff his fingers were. An open shirt was better than no shirt, he decided, and let it go.
Then he drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and got to his feet to go make use of the cabin's facilities.
Walking sent stabbing pains through his feet with every step, and by the time he was lowering himself back down into the nest of blankets again, there was sweat prickling along his spine.
He and Steve had walked for over a mile yesterday, possibly several miles, with Steve half-carrying his dead weight by the end of it. In retrospect, he wasn't sure how they had done it.
"You should get some more rest, too," Tony said.
Steve was pulling his pants back on, his jaw tightening every time he had to shift all of his weight to one foot. The blue leather was sticking to his skin in a way that suggested that it was still damp, and wrestling it on seemed to take most of Steve's concentration. It left Tony free to watch him, so even though he personally would have let the costume dry more thoroughly before putting it back on, he refrained from pointing that out. Even if he'd mentioned it, Steve wasn't likely to choose sitting around naked over clothing when clothing was an option.
"You know," Jan observed, when Steve had finished fastening his belt and come to sit by her in front of the wood stove, "there's a reason none of my costumes have ever involved leather."
"You put Hank in that Goliath outfit with the leather bondage straps across his chest." The words felt awkward in Tony's mouth, and he immediately wished he hadn't said them. He must still be more out of it than he thought if he was bringing up Hank.
They didn't talk about Hank anymore, not to Jan. Even during his brief, two-week fling with her, Tony had tried to mention him as little as possible.
They should have noticed that something was wrong. It shouldn't have taken Jan's black eye and a disastrous fight that nearly got half the team killed to get them to finally realize that something had been deeply wrong with Hank.
The Avengers had promised not to interfere in one another's personal lives. It was an attempt at protecting one another's privacy that Tony had capitalized on more than once, when he'd been trying to manage his heart problems and conceal his identity as Tony Stark, but sometimes it meant that they missed things they shouldn't have.
At least they'd also failed to notice his drinking. The fact that he had apparently managed to keep it from affecting his performance as Iron Man had been one of the few things that had let him keep some sliver of self-respect after Bethany had finished knocking sense back into him. A few more months without her intervention, and he could have ended up as much of a danger to his teammates as Hank had, and without even the excuse of scrambled brain chemistry.
"I was young and foolish," Jan said, the humor leaving her voice.
There was an awkward pause, and then Steve said, just a little too brightly, "I think it's stopped snowing."
Subtlety was not always one of Steve's strong points.
Tony drew in a breath to point out that the smoke from the cabin's wood stove wouldn't be visible from the quinjet unless the ceiling raised itself at least a thousand feet and found himself yawning instead. His entire body still ached, his hands and feet throbbing a hot counterpoint to the dull pain of bruises and stiff muscles. He'd felt less battered after hours' worth of fighting the Mandarin or Titanium Man.
And he had had the protection of the armor when the snow had hit him. The others hadn't had that luxury.
Falling into that stream had been an unforgivably stupid mistake. If he hadn't been forced to discard his armor, he could be working on rewiring the circuitry and repairing the jet boots right now. Tony could have flown the rest of the team out himself, one at a time, with no need to wait for Vision and Wanda to show up and rescue them. And Steve wouldn't be facing possible damage to his fingers. Neither would Tony, for that matter.
"The ceiling's too low for them to spot us from the air unless they're scanning for heat sources." Tony yawned again, and forced himself to sit up a little straighter. "If I had any part of my armor, I could set up some kind of beacon, but as it is..." He let the words trail off. Pointing out what his clumsy dive into the water had cost them wasn't necessary; the others all knew it as well as he did.
Don looked up from the coffee mug he had been staring into and frowned at Tony. "We are not going back out and getting your armor."
"I didn't suggest it." Being half-frozen hadn't removed his common sense – pin-pointing the exact spot where he'd lost the armor would be next to impossible without proper equipment. There was no way of knowing how long he and Steve had wandered around after they had crawled out of the water, or how many circles they'd walked in.
Not too many – Steve would have kept them going in a far straighter line than most people would have been able to manage – but it was cold outside and warm in here, and none of them were in immediate danger.
His armor could wait. He wasn't going to risk his teammates' well-being over it. Doom wasn't likely to be out there looking for it right now, not when the storm had only just ended.
The others were still talking, he realized abruptly, as Steve's voice said his name.
"Tony?"
"Sorry," he apologized. "What were you saying?"
"Lie back down before you fall over." Steve smiled at him, a familiar grin that warmed something inside Tony even though he could see the strain still lurking around Steve's eyes. He sounded affectionate, even slightly amused. It was a tone Steve had used with Iron Man often, but only rarely with Tony Stark.
Most of the previous night post-stream disaster was a blur, but Tony distinctly remembered asking Steve to leave him. Only the knowledge that he was slowing Steve down had gotten him back to his feet the first few times he had fallen, and even that source of energy had eventually run out. If it hadn't been for Steve's overwhelming stubbornness...
It reminded him of Bethany, in a way, or maybe Bethany had reminded him of Steve. Both of them had saved him. Neither of them would have had room for him in their life.
It was unfair for Steve to smile at him that way without the armor between them.
The floor felt slightly softer this time around; Tony closed his eyes, and didn't bother to protest when Jan made a snide comment to the effect that he clearly must be tired if he was willing to follow advice.
He'd started to drift off, almost everything but Steve's presence just beside him slowly fading out of his awareness, when he heard the distinct whine of a quinjet's double engines.
It was warm in the quinjet, and despite the fact that it was substantially brighter than the cabin, Steve was half-asleep within minutes of taking off. All he wanted to do was close his eyes and sink into the padded quinjet seat; instead he forced himself awake, glancing around the cabin to check on his teammates.
Tony was slumped in his seat, eyes closed, a thermos of hot cocoa cradled loosely between his hands. He'd been only half-awake when they'd stumbled into the quinjet, barely moving under his own power and groggily insisting that they get his armor back before they left the mountain. Steve had tried to take some of his weight, but then Vision had appeared on Tony's other side and told Steve that he had Tony, and Steve should concentrate on helping himself right now. "You're injured," he'd said. "Let me help him," and Steve had, reluctantly, obeyed.
Jan looked equally exhausted, huddling in a blanket and staring silently into space with the dazed look of someone who'd pushed herself past her limits.
Don was leaning forward in his seat, elbows on his knees, and arguing the logistics of fetching Thor's hammer out of the ravine with the back of Vision's head. Fetching the Iron Man armor had been easy, a simple matter of pinpointing it with the quinjet's instruments and sending Vision down to rescue it from the water. Retrieving Mjolnir sounded like it was going to be something of a problem.
"You're going to have to get me down to it somehow. No one else can lift it."
"The bottom of the ravine is too uneven for the quinjet to land safely." Vision sounded unruffled and slightly detached, as he almost always did. "I'll have to fly you down myself."
"Yeah, I thought so." Don grimaced. "I hate having other people fly me around – no offense, Vision." He sighed, looking tired and worn-down. "Sorry about this. If I hadn't dropped it down the ravine in the first place, Thor would have been able to get himself and Jan safely out of the blizzard, and probably been able to rescue Cap and Tony, too."
Assigning blame after the fact wasn't going to do anyone any good, especially when it was needless blame. "I saw Thor grab for Jan just before the avalanche hit," Steve said. "Neither of you had a chance to get the hammer back."
Don shrugged, looking only partly mollified. "I could have kept a better grip on it in the first place."
"And I could have not blown us up." Tony spoke without opening his eyes, the words slow and distant.
"And Doom could have decided not to be an egocentric psychopath in an ugly mask," Jan added tartly.
"No, egocentric psychopath is his core personality." Wanda twisted in the copilot's seat to look back over her shoulder at them. "We're just inside the Transian border. In this part of the mountains, it's not surprising you had bad luck all around. This part of the Carpathians is supposed to be cursed; it's probably why Doom chose to perform his ritual here."
They should have brought Wanda with them, Steve thought absently. She knew more about magic and rituals than anyone else currently on the Avengers, and she knew the area. "At least we stopped him," he observed. "Things could have gone a lot worse." On the other hand, if Wanda had come with them, there would have been no one who knew the area to help rescue them. Vision might not have been able to find them on his own.
"Indeed they could have," Vision agreed. "We were afraid the worst had happened when we lost your distress signal in the storm. I'm sorry we couldn't get here sooner."
"We're just glad you got here. We would have been in real trouble if you hadn't shown up." Steve let his head fall back against the back of his seat, and stared up at the quinjet's metal ceiling. There was a line of rivets directly overhead, and a bundle of coated wiring that branched off into a half-dozen smaller tributaries, each leading to a different piece of instrumentation. Tony must have been re-wiring or overhauling the plane's systems before they'd left; the guts of the quinjet weren't usually visible like this.
There was quiet for a while, broken only by the soothing drone of the engines. Tony gradually slumped further down in his seat, his breathing slowing into the even rhythm of sleep.
Across the aisle from Steve, Don was dozing as well. Jan had shrunken down and flown forward, probably moving just for the sake of keeping herself awake, and was now perched on the back of Wanda's chair, speaking to her and Vision in low tones. Steve couldn't make out what they were saying beyond the occasional word, but he wasn't really listening. It was nice to let someone else take charge for a change.
His head buzzed with exhaustion, but every time he started to fall asleep, the slow throb in his fingers and toes pulled him back. It was a wonder that Tony was able to sleep so deeply; his hands and feet were in worse shape than Steve's, including one gash on his heel that Don had predicted would need stitches.
Had he imagined it, or had Tony been half flirting with him last night? All those comments about liking Steve naked, and the unfairness of not getting a good look at him – Tony hadn't been coherent enough to make jokes, not at that stage of punch-drunk exhaustion.
He'd heard rumors that Tony Stark's love life occasionally included men, but Steve had always dismissed that as made-up celebrity gossip. It wasn't like there was a dearth of that when it came to Tony, and rumors of bisexuality seemed to be almost standard for the supposedly debauched rich and famous these days. Some things, it seemed, didn't change with time.
The fact that Tony – that Iron Man – might return his interest wasn't a possibility he'd ever seriously contemplated.
In some ways, it had been much less complicated when Steve hadn't known who was behind Iron Man's helmet, when he'd still been safely unattainable. Tony Stark was frighteningly breakable, capable of being hurt in ways a faceless suit of armor wasn't. He drank too much, or at least, he had, and slept with his own teammates while lying to them about who he was, and was entirely too cavalier about both his safety and other people's feelings.
He was also stubbornly brave, more brilliant with machines than anyone else Steve had ever known, and...
The plane banked sharply to the left, jerking Steve out of the light doze he had drifted in to. Vision must be taking them down to hover in the ravine.
Another twenty minutes or so, and they'd be on their way out of here and back home, where Tony could get his feet seen to and Steve could sleep for a week.
They'd earned it. The aftermath of the mission might have been an unqualified disaster, but they had at least stopped Doom. And kept one another from dying.
He hadn't lost anyone this time, despite coming far too close to it.
Tony ought to have known there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that Steve would leave him behind – anymore than Tony himself would have left a friend to die. More than a friend; even without the armor, Tony was still Iron Man, still the same man whose voice was the first thing Steve had heard when he'd come out of the ice. His knight in shining armor, whose frustrating dedication to Tony Stark had always been a continual source of jealousy.
Maybe he hadn't dismissed those rumors as completely as he'd tried to tell himself he had.
If they were true, if Tony really was a fellow queer, then all those fantasies about Tony sweaty and shirtless and smeared with machine oil, and all that hopeless crushing on Iron Man might not be quite so hopeless. Not that Sharon potentially returning his interest had made approaching her any easier, but considering that he'd actually made a floundering attempt at starting a relationship with her, well, he was getting better at it. He'd never gotten up the courage to try anything with Betsy, back during the war, and she'd been a good friend.
Tony cared about him as a friend, too, and unlike Betsy, seemed to actually be attracted to him, and that was a good basis for a relationship, wasn't it? And he was getting ahead of himself now. First, maybe he ought to start by with flirting back.
Later. After they got back to New York, and his hands and feet stopped throbbing and itching so much. And after that pale, bruised look left Tony's face.
For now, he was going to close his eyes and let Wanda and Vision take them home.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three
no subject
By the way, does anyone have any links to scans of the infamous "red thong incident"? I'd like to take a gander at that ... :)
no subject
My thoughts exactly ...!!
no subject
http://chujo-hime.tumblr.com/post/16495465215/when-steve-found-out-tony-was-iron-man-or-the-red
no subject
(I was imagining a somewhat different version ... but I guess that so-called "ass-shots" on men would have been out of the question back then.)
no subject
no subject
Hypothermia and sharing body heat is one of my favorite tropes and you write it amazing. I also love Steve's thoughts and that he feels so protective of Tony, and his slow realization that Tony might actually reciprocate his feelings. <3
no subject
And Steve thinking about his feelings for Tony is just an awesome way to end the fic.
He wrapped an arm around Tony again, curling his body protectively around him. *__* This is what the shack challenge is all about for me. Hurt! Snuggling for safety! Slurred declarations! Everyone huddling under blankets!
One of the things I really like about stories from you is that the more familiar I am with canon, the more little awesome refs I get.
Aw Don and Tony angsting about it was all their fault! Jan and Steve being more level-headed. Jan getting over what just happened with Hank. Steve bummed about the team. Tony wanting a drink and thinking about Bethany and comparing her to Steve! lol Steve elbowing Tony when he was staring at topless!Jan. Wanda and Vision to the rescue!
no subject
no subject
no subject
One of my favorite things about hypothermia fic is the altered state of mind, and you do that so well, making it by turns both angsty and funny. I love all the awkward moments with Steve, Tony and Jan, and how Don really just didn't give a damn about the nakedness. I also loved how Tony was an unreliable narrator, asserting that his teammates were thinking about his "stupid mistake" when it was obvious to me that they weren't. I adore unreliable narration, and Tony is perfect for it. Anyway, this fic was a wonderful treat!
no subject
Overall it's a well-written, sometimes amusing H/C story and I enjoyed it very much. Thank you. <3
no subject
no subject
Thank you for sharing this brilliant story! :)
no subject
no subject
tl;dr ❤❤❤❤❤!
no subject