http://tresmaxwell.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] tresmaxwell.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] cap_ironman2012-06-05 01:23 am

Fic: Worshiping at the Modern Altar Chapter 5, R

Universe: Movie
Rating: R
Warnings: Language, a bit of violence
Beta: None
Summary: "We're not a team, we're a time bomb."
Pairings/Characters: Steve/Tony, plus loads of other characters... like everyone.
Word Count: About 5,700



Chapter Four - LINK

Chapter Five - Powder Keg Syndrome

Tony felt like throwing up. If he wandered away to do so, someone was bound to notice and he couldn’t take another minute of the others coddling him because someone walked in and stole his super identity. His brilliance made Iron Man, Iron Man did not make him. Even without the suit, Tony was more intelligent than ninety-nine percent of the world’s population.

Despite all that, his mind kept going back to the moment he’d had with Steve shortly after they’d met, when the bigger man told him he didn’t know what it meant to be a real hero. Without his suit, he was a sideline act, a lab technician, a cheerleader. There was no way he could go into battle the way he was.

He was well trained, sure, but not like the super-spy wonder twins. SHIELD would never give him another mission without his suit, and there was a snowball’s chance in hell that Steve would let him anywhere near conflict if he was vulnerable. As fond as he was of the Captain, the man was a little over protective.

At the moment, Steve was occupied arguing with Bruce about the experiment no one knew existed. Tony could tell Steve was trying to keep a level head about it since it was Bruce he was arguing with, but his anger was overflowing.

Tony didn’t want to be involved. He wanted to be downstairs in the server room, picking up the pieces of Jarvis so he could rebuild. The missing serum was important, though, maybe even more important than tracking down his suits. No one could use a MARK suit without authorization and an arc reactor.

“You told me you were going to use that blood to determine what my immunities are. Why would you lie to me about that?” Steve was a decibel below a shout, pacing the room like an animal.

“I didn’t lie, I had some leftover after I was done testing,” Bruce’s elucidation wasn’t easing Steve any.

The blonde turned on his heel mid-stride, “So you decided to use it without consulting me?!”

“All of my work is based off what they did to you. There are attributes in your blood that can’t be repl-”

“I’m just going to stop everybody there,” Clint butted in. “You’re talking about stuff that’s beyond classified and she,” he pointed over at Jane, who blinked owlishly, “has no clearance, so maybe we should take a breath and relax for a minute.”

Tony pushed his hands into his hair and scratched his scalp roughly. This argument was pointless. What mattered was that the serum was in enemy hands and they needed to know what it could do before they were hit with it. Getting to his feet, Tony reminded them, “The girl just got back from Asgard, so I think her clearance level is irrelevant. But if it would make everybody feel better, why don’t you take her outside for a few minutes, Thor?”

The blonde demi-god glared at him, but gently took Jane’s arm and led her onto the balcony. The pair stood within view of the windows, talking quietly. Her thin eyebrows drew up in distress as she spoke and Thor shook his head and brushed his hand across her back. Tony could tell she was asking if she should go.

With Clint’s concerns out of the way, Tony went to Bruce, “What’s it do?”

Bruce held out his hands palm up, “I told you, it’s meant to stabal-”

“You know what I mean, Bruce. What’s its potential? Have you done any testing?”

Clearly frazzled, the doctor rubbed the corners of his eyes with his thumb and index fingers. He walked away a few paces, bracing his knuckles against his hip, “The initial tests were promising. At the right dosage, it could create a blend of my… monstrosity and the Captain’s unique physical prowess, but it destroys tissue as easily as it fuses with it.”

“It could be used to make more people like us?” Steve’s tone was dangerous and his unoccupied hand tightened into a fist. Tony could hear the other grip the handle of his shield until the leather creaked.

“It wasn’t ready for that. And that wasn’t my goal, it wasn’t for anyone else.”

Steve straightened up to his impressive height, towering over the doctor, “But you didn’t bother to consider what kind of consequences it would have, did you?”

Tony could feel it building, the powder keg effect. It happened to their team too often. They got along better than they used to, but their opinions were so different and no one currently residing in the tower ever backed down from a fight. The tension was wrapping around them and Tony was the one who’d created it this time.

The edges of Bruce’s irises brightened, making Natasha take a step away and Clint to trail his fingers down to the knife in his boot. Tony put a hand on Steve’s chest and applied enough pressure that the super soldier broke off from the argument. Steve went to the bar and dropped his shield on the counter, bracing both hands against the marble surface with his back to them.

“Yes, Bruce did bad and Steve is pissed, let’s get back to how far your serum is from application,” Tony said, looking between them.

Bruce visibly calmed, and the rest of the room followed suit, “If they had someone of our caliber working with my notes, they could get a working prototype for human testing in a year, maybe. Unless…”

“Unless?” Tony urged.

“Unless they didn’t care what their death ratio was for test subjects, in which case they would have a five percent success rate with the formula I already have.”

One in twenty. The statistic alarmed Tony. If someone had a supply of people to inject, there could be a lot of green rage monsters running around in a short period of time. “But there’s no way to tell how stable the transformation would be. That five percent could be genetically unsound and end up dying anyway, right?”

“There’s that chance. I don’t know, I haven’t even moved past testing on single cells.”

The sound of an approaching helicopter made Tony look towards the bay windows. It had been sitting at the edge of his attention, but he’d assumed it was passing by. It was now loud enough to be hovering above his tower.

“Fury,” he said. Tony wasn’t surprised someone had called him in, the situation was beyond critical. It didn’t make him happy either. The longer SHIELD was in the dark about his missing suits, the less crap he’d have to shovel through to go get them back.

A few moments after the chop of the rotor faded, the elevator dinged and Director Fury cast his scowl around the room. Tony didn’t bother to suppress his groan. He turned it into a joke without a second thought, “I told you guys not to invite him, he’s a party killer.”

Fury set his good eye on Tony as he and his dark-haired shadow, Maria, got off the elevator, “Seems to me that your party is already over, Stark.”

Maria immediately surveyed the wreckage and the spray paint with disapproval. She kept her arms folded behind her back, stepping over the debris without ever looking down. In another life, Tony would already be hitting on her. The woman was so crisp and professional in her uniform that she looked like she ate guys for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Power bitch, some of the guys on his board of directors liked to say. Tony used to laugh at that joke, until he found out how dangerous a real power bitch could be. Natasha was the first one who made him want to bite back remarks like that.

“Report,” Fury barked after reading the threat scrawled across Tony’s wall. “What’s this mean?”

Like the good little spy that he was, Clint rattled off the events of the last few days to his boss. Steve filled in a lot of the blanks and Fury’s expression darkened with each piece of information he was given. Since the man was always scowling, it wasn’t an improvement. When they got to the bit about Bruce’s experiments, the director’s eyebrows went up and Bruce slipped away muttering that he needed to check the rest of the labs.

“Since the tower’s security has been compromised, I want everything with a classification of level three or above moved out,” the director told Maria.

“Sir,” the woman responded and was gone before Tony could even open his mouth.

“Hey!” Tony went halfway to the elevator, but it closed and Maria disappeared. He turned his anger on Fury, “You can’t just clear out my tower. Everything here is mine, it belongs to me. You do understand the concept of personal property?”

If Fury was troubled by Tony’s outburst, he didn’t show it. Completely ignoring his question, the director asked, “How long before you can get your network back online?”

“Jarvis is not a network, he’s an extremely sophisticated AI that can run anything from a house to a plane. It took me ten years to get him where he was.”

“We don’t have ten years. If you can’t get him off the ground in forty-eight hours and get your assembly line cranking on a new suit, you’re sitting on the bench.”

Tony threw his hands in the air, “I knew it! They stole my stuff, you can’t keep me out of this.” There was a whisper of touch on his shoulders that could only be Steve. The taller man massaged him gently, silently trying to calm him. Tony didn’t want to be calm. He wanted to find whoever violated his home and be the one to knock them on their ass. It was his pride talking when he growled, “I’ll have it done in thirty-six and I’ll have these guys lying dead at your feet by forty-eight.”

Fury considered him with his one dark eye and then nodded, “We’ll keep the tower secure for now. Cap, make sure he stays on track. No distractions.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. We’ll be setting up a base of operations on a few of your lower floors to start our search for the culprits,” Fury said, his long black coat swirling around him as he turned away.

That was the last thing Tony wanted to hear. If he was going to get everything done, he didn’t need Fury standing over his shoulder the entire time. “What, did you forget where you parked your invisible aircraft carrier?” Tony shouted after him.

“Get to work, Stark. You have big promises to fulfill,” came Fury’s quick retort. As he passed the spies, he ordered, “You two, with me.”

Once they were gone, Tony rubbed his face and fell back against Steve’s chest. He was already tired and he hadn’t even started yet. There would be miles of corrupted and incomplete code to repair, assuming there was anything to salvage at all. Steve’s arms winding around his waist made him feel a little better, but only enough that he remembered yelling at him. Guilt swallowed his warmth.

Tony fumbled for something to say that wasn’t too embarrassing. He didn’t like apologizing, since he had to admit he was wrong to make it worthwhile. “It’s probably best that you got me away from Shakespeare before I said something too unfortunate. I was little worked up,” he said, brushing his fingers over the strong muscles of Steve’s forearm. It wasn’t in him to say how much of a jerk he was for taking it out on Steve. The words sat in his mouth, turning bitter.

Steve’s chuckle resounded through Tony’s spine and slowly spread through the rest of him as a pleasant tingle, “I can only imagine why. Don’t worry, I can give you some slack, just don’t go picking fights with anyone else.” There was forgiveness in Steve’s tone, forgiveness for something Tony couldn’t even admit.

“Square deal,” Tony said, leaving everything else in limbo. Maybe he’d return to it one day, but there was so much to do first.

“Do you really think you can fix Jarvis in that amount of time?” Steve asked into the crook of his neck, his breath tickling Tony’s skin.

Tony sighed, “Not unless I find a way to clone myself.”

A soft, meek voice behind them mentioned, “I built all the equipment in my lab in New Mexico, maybe I could help.”

Steve stepped away as Tony turned, but kept his hand on Tony’s hip. Oddly, the young astrophysicist was alone. Tony couldn’t say where Thor might’ve gone since no one had a very good grasp of how his mind worked. His best guess was that the Asgardian went downstairs to meet with the director… or he was off rescuing kittens, Tony really didn’t have any idea.

Tony had learned a little about Jane Foster in the SHIELD file on Thor, but she was a blip in a sea of information about Asgard and Einstein-Rosen bridges between worlds. Most of his knowledge about her came from her published work. Her theories on Lorentzian traversable wormholes caught his interest a few years before their Norse god crash-landed in the desert. She’d still been a grad student when her first article was published, which was part of why Tony had bothered to read it.

He considered her offer carefully, deciding to put her through her paces before he let her anywhere near Jarvis’s remains, “What kind of processing power were you able to get out of your hardware?”

“Keep in mind that I can’t get great parts out where I work, but most of my data needed at least four hundred teraflops for analysis. My machines could handle up to five hundred,” Jane answered easily. As if in defense of her machines, she added, “I don’t get a lot of funding.”

“Do you write your own code?”

Jane grinned and let out a snort of laughter that she quickly covered with her long sweater sleeve. Her cheeks reddened as she muttered, “Sorry. Um, yes, I wrote the programs for all of my machines. There really wasn’t any existing programming that would take the parameters of my calculations and apply them to the raw data we were retrieving. I reworked some code from the Hubble telescope and… I’m rambling, sorry again.”

Tony was impressed. Steve looked lost, which was not surprising. When Tony glanced at him, Steve shrugged and said, “I’m just here to lift the heavy stuff and keep you from getting waylaid by other projects. Don’t ask me if I understood any of that.”

“I know, I know, you prefer touch screens and books with pictures,” Tony joked with a fond smile.

“Hey now…”

Tony took Jane’s arm in his and led her towards the stairs, “Why are we attracted to dumb blondes, do you think? Is it because we’re so bright we need a break every now and again, or because they have such great abs?”

Steve thumped his ear with one finger, barely hard enough to sting. Tony rubbed the offended piece of flesh against his shoulder and shot a glare at the Captain. All he got in return was a wry smirk.

Jane’s lips puckered in her attempt to keep a straight face, “It’s the abs, no doubt.”

Tony insisted that they move their work out of the damp lower level so he wouldn’t grow mold before they finished. It took trips down to the old server room as well as Tony’s tech lockers, but within a half an hour, they had everything they could need spread out in Tony’s media room. It seemed to be one of the few spaces that missed the assault.

The new parts they stacked in front of the floor to ceiling television, nearly hiding it from view. Steve pushed the seating against the opposite wall so they could lay out Jarvis’s parts. The black hunks of metal and melted plastic covered the floor like coagulated spots of blood. Tony looked over it with an overbearing sense of loss. Jarvis was one of his finest works and he only hoped he could replicate him properly.

When they were ready to start the rebuild, Steve pressed a chaste kiss to the corner of Tony’s mouth and said, “I’m going to check in with Fury.”

“Tell him I don’t need a babysitter, you could be doing better things with your time.”

Steve nodded, his blue gaze glinting as he tossed out, “But Fury and I both know how you are, so I’m sure I’ll be back.”

Tony watched the man’s ass as he walked away, shaking his head slightly, “It might be more than the abs.”

Jane started construction on the new hardware by unpacking a server cabinet from its box, and Tony set his sights on recovering whatever he could from the melted machines. What he really wanted was the tower’s video footage from the previous afternoon. As long as the internal magnetic discs weren’t too warped, he could read the data into the laptop he’d dredged out of storage.

After gathering the motherboards and processors together, Jane paused to twist her mousy hair into a bun and take off her gigantic, knit sweater. She adjusted her camisole before touching the brushed steel coffee table to ground herself. Rid of the static electricity that could destroy the delicate equipment, Jane sat cross-legged in front of her work. She opened the plastic for the first processor and said, “May I ask you something?”

Tony carefully continued to strip the blackened components away from the memory disc, “Yes, my hair is natural. No, you may not touch it.”

For a second, Jane didn’t even breathe as she lowered the chip into place on the motherboard. When she secured the housing over it, she responded, “How did you and Steve get together? I mean, no offense, but the celebrity magazines all paint you as a hopeless philanderer.”

Tony arched one eyebrow at the word ‘hopeless’. The philanderer bit was impossible to argue, but he never would’ve considered himself hopeless. “You read that garbage? You’re losing points Ms. Foster.” Hooking a portable reader into the laptop, Tony finally admitted, “I wasn’t exactly planning on being anything else. The playboy thing worked and people didn’t expect me to be much more than that.”

“So, that definitely doesn’t answer my question.” She pulled a face, her nose wrinkling as she said, “And it’s not all garbage.”

“I don’t really do the ‘social bonding over boyfriends’ thing.”

“Oh, come on,” she goaded. “I’ll tell you how I met Thor.”

There was inherent curiosity surrounding Thor’s relationship, but Tony wasn’t sure if he was inquisitive enough to trade the intimate details of his own life to find out.

Tony got the disc rotating in the reader. He adjusted the feedback levels and watched the left-hand window for any signs of his data. He turned up the rpm and got smug satisfaction when file folders popped up like weeds. As expected, some were clearly corrupted. There was more than enough left to sort through.

He blamed his success with the memory retrieval for his honesty, it put him in a better mood, “Steve is so far from anything I’ve ever had that he fills needs I never realized were there.” At her questioning look, Tony added, “I guess that still doesn’t answer your question… He came to me, there was wild sex, and we’ve been fairly inseparable ever since.”

Tony was too busy paging through the files to see her expression, but he could guess that his bluntness mortified her. She seemed like the type to blush at the smallest mentioning of intercourse. Under the file heading for security, Tony found the surveillance video he was looking for. A large media player opened on the laptop screen, showing the entryway to his penthouse. The image was pixilated in the bottom corner and had some static noise, but it was still viable. He was fast-forwarding through the day when she spoke again.

“What about your secretary? You two had a thing, didn’t you?”

Tony closed his eyes for a second. Things didn’t end badly with Pepper, but he didn’t like thinking about it. No one had ever broken up with him before Pepper. He wasn’t sure how he’d made it through life without being on the wrong end of breakup at least once, but she’d been his first. “More nuggets of truth from your celebrity rags?” He tracked through the moment where he and Steve left to get lunch, watching the way he moved around the other man. It was strange observing it from the outside. He could see what Pepper had seen.

“It wasn’t just the magazines that said so, I mean, you made her CEO of your company,” Jane mentioned and grabbed a box of RAM to install.

Tony paused the video feed where Steve was smiling down at him and his face had a glow he would’ve sworn he couldn’t get. “We were living together,” Tony said and glanced up from the grainy image, “Pepper and I, but one day I found this binder with all the stuff she used to remember for me, like my social security number and the numbers of my safety deposit boxes, and I realized she was leaving.”

“Did she say why?”

“You are all about the questions…”

“Why’d she leave?”

With a sigh, Tony moved the video forward and continued to watch the empty entryway. “She said I was in love with someone else and there was no room for her.”

Pepper’s face had been so serene when she’d said it, as though she’d been battling with the idea for weeks, or even months, and had come to terms with the fact. Tony was certain now that it was her lack of reaction that upset him the most. Pepper was an emotional person, so for her to be calm when she was breaking ties meant that she’d been too hurt to bring it up when she’d made the discovery. At the time, Tony didn’t understand what she was talking about, but now he knew. He could see it.

They worked in silence for several minutes. Tony opened up the feed from the cameras in the freight elevator and his workshop, calibrating them to match the time codes on the entryway.

“I hit him with my van.”

Tony’s head snapped up, “What?”

Jane bit her bottom lip with a shameful smile, “I hit Thor with my car and had to take him to the hospital. There might have been a taser in there somewhere, but that was my assistant, I had nothing to do with it.”

“You had to take him to the hospital? What kind of van do you drive, a tank?” Thor could take a hit from the Hulk and the big green monster could rip apart tanks as if they were toys. Tony could hardly believe what she was telling him.

“Well, he was mortal at the time, so it didn’t take much.”

“Still, a taser?” Tony laughed, going back to his footage. “I’m going to have to bring that up later.”

“No, please don’t! I’m sure he wouldn’t appreciate…”

Tony didn’t hear another word. At around two-oh-five on the surveillance tape, barely twenty minutes after he and Steve walked out the door, a woman stepped off the elevator. There were five men in the freight elevator, one with a duffle bag that probably held the components to rig his car. They were the muscle; it was the painfully familiar redhead he focused on. The images were too compromised to see her well, but Tony didn’t have a doubt. Every curve was covered in tight, black leather, the belt with the intersecting red triangles buckled at her waist like always. Still a room away from the camera, the spy stopped and put a bullet into it. The rest of Tony’s footage was static.

Long after the feed was gone, Tony stared at his laptop. In the other windows, he could see the goons going after his suits and trashing his workshop in the process. When his brain jump-started, anger settled in his guts like hot coals. He shipped all of the footage to Fury and sprang to his feet, ignoring Jane as she asked where he was going.

Tony slapped the call button for the elevator. After just a few seconds, he lost his patience and sprinted to the stairs. He pounded down the never-ending staircase so quickly that he was dizzy by the time he got to SHIELD’s makeshift base. One of the guards at the door held up a hand, saying, “Mr. Stark, you need to-”

Tony ducked under his arm and slammed through the door, shouting, “Romanoff!”

The room went silent at his entrance. SHIELD’s teams had set up their traveling show very quickly, Tony noted. They’d even brought their own tables. They were arranged in rows, computers clustered three to a table with an agent at each one. All of the windows had been covered with thick cloth and there were bundled power cords snaking across the floor in enough places to be truly hazardous.

Director Fury was standing beside a projection with the rest of the team, going over what looked like a bird’s eye image of the tower. There were notes on the image by the service garage where deliveries were made, probably the route they’d taken to get inside. Tony had everyone’s undivided attention, but the Russian spy was the only one he could see in his tunneled rage. She had that confused look that was as easy for her to fake as every other human emotion. Tony wondered if she actually felt anything or if it was all an act.

“Who the hell are you really working for? I mean, you say it’s SHIELD when it’s convenient, you say it’s me, you say it’s Mother Fucking Russia, but who is it really? Or are you so deep in this quadruple spy shit that you don’t even remember?!” Tony was aware that he was yelling loud enough for the neighboring boroughs to hear him, but he didn’t care.

“Stark, I don’t-” Natasha started.

“Where are my fucking suits?”

The shock wore off the room and suddenly everything leapt into motion. Steve came over to get him away from Natasha, grabbing his biceps to push him back. Clint stepped up to fend Tony off even though Natasha was still standing there with bewilderment written across her features. His threat merged with Thor’s questions and Fury’s shouts that they needed to calm down. Banner backed away from the chaos as his gaze flicked around for an escape route.

Tony fought against Steve’s hold hard enough that Steve had to tighten his grip. When he couldn’t get free, he kept shouting over the bigger man’s shoulder, “Did you just want to bring me low or is somebody paying you, huh?! How much am I worth?”

“Stop, Tony!” Steve pleaded.

Natasha’s uncertain stare was only fueling his anger. It bubbled up into every scathing word he threw at her, “Was the car bomb their idea or did you just decide you wanted to add a little more red to your fucking ledger?!”

A flash of hurt entered her eyes, covered so quickly by unfeeling calm that Tony’s gut said it was real. It was so distracting that he didn’t notice Clint’s fist headed for his jaw. Pain exploded through his mouth and the sharp metallic taste of blood followed. The Captain’s hold kept him from getting knocked to the floor, but it was gone a second later as Steve turned on Hawkeye. The muscles bulged in Steve’s arms when he grabbed the front of Clint’s shirt and hoisted him off the ground.

Fearless as always, Clint growled, “Put me down before you get hurt, old man.”

“You touch him again and I’ll-”

A massive bang like a thunderclap cut through the conflict. Thor’s hammer was an inch deep in the flooring, the cement crackling as the web of fractures finished forming. Leaving the hammer in place, Thor straightened up and demanded, “If Tony has accusations, let him bring forward proof. I am certain he would not blame lightly.”

Blood warmed his chin as it slowly rolled from his lip. Tony wiped it away with the back of his hand and told Fury, “I sent you a file you need to see.”

“You had better have a damn good reason for this, Stark,” the director warned as he accessed his email.

A few clicks and the footage of the entryway appeared on the projector. It was queued up to where the elevator doors slid open and Natasha walked in to shoot the camera. The other videos of the workshop took over, but no one was really watching them. Every eye had turned to the redhead. Her face was neutral, unrevealing.

Natasha met Fury’s gaze first, then Tony’s as she said, “That’s not me.”

“How can you say that with a straight face?” Tony snarled.

Before things could get heated again, Clint asked, “Is that time stamp right?” Steve begrudgingly set him down and Clint tugged the wrinkles out of his shirt. “Are you sure this happened at two?”

“We left at about one forty-five,” Steve provided, forgetting about his vendetta with the archer for the moment.

Tony nodded to confirm.

“Then that can’t be Tasha, she was with me, sir,” Clint told Fury.

The director ran the feed backwards so he could watch the woman step off the elevator again. He froze the image just as she was drawing her arm up to fire. The file was badly corrupted, so the video was fuzzier than a home movie, but the costume and hair were unmistakable. Fury clasped his hands at the small of his back as he examined the screen.

Tony admired the fact that Romanov wasn’t even sweating. She stood with her feet shoulder-width apart and her chin tilted up in defiance as she stared at him. It pissed him off that she wasn’t showing an ounce of fear, but he had to give her training credit. The woman was a brick wall.

“Are you certain she was in your presence at all times?” Fury asked without turning his good eye away from the screen.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’re not covering for her because you two are intimate?”

Even with the accusation in Fury’s tone, Clint didn’t flinch, “No, sir. We keep our personal lives out of our work. Our mission is logged in the network. Its designation was changed to complete at fifteen hundred hours, sir.”

Tony studied the projected image and then Natasha, something chewing at the edge of his awareness. It was like a childhood game of ‘spot the differences’, but the differences were so subtle that they were almost impossible to discern. It could’ve been the corrupted data causing the slight shift in hair color and the height of the camera could explain the strange height-to-weight ratio. The only thing Tony couldn’t explain away was the size of her breasts. The woman in the video had smaller boobs than Natasha did. They didn’t fill out the costume correctly. Him noticing something like that would’ve made Pepper roll her eyes.

Convinced and a little ashamed, Tony asked, “Who has it out for you bad enough to go to these lengths?”

“Do you want the list in alphabetical order?” Natasha responded dryly, one brow crawling up her forehead.

Tony motioned at the screen, “Do you recognize her?”

Natasha studied the woman. “No,” she admitted eventually. The image wasn’t good enough to pick out specific features, so Tony was expecting as much.

He didn’t get a chance to launch into questioning, Fury took control of the situation, saying, “We can handle things from here. You need to get your ass back upstairs and fix your electric butler.”

“He’s a-”

“I don’t care what he is, get up there and get him back online,” Fury’s voice warned against argument and Tony regrettably left the group.

Steve followed him out, “I’ll walk with you.” In the relative privacy of the lobby, Steve came around in front of him so he could get a look at his split lip. “I can’t believe he hit you,” Steve grumbled as he gingerly wiped at the crusted blood on Tony’s chin.

“You would’ve done the same thing,” his words came out in a hiss when Steve’s fingertip brushed the tender skin of his lip. He jerked away without meaning to, responding to the sharp burst of pain.

“Sorry,” the blonde said sheepishly. “We should get you some ice.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“Doesn’t mean you don’t need ice.”

Tony got into the elevator and dropped his head against the wall, smiling when Steve got in after him. It made mouth sting. Tony wanted to tell him that he would need his hands free to work, but knew he’d be wasting his breath. There was no arguing with Steve. His boyfriend would be in his kitchen putting ice in a plastic bag no matter what he said. And people thought Tony had stubbornness issues.

“They need to be consulting Banner about what materials someone would need to mass produce his serum, that’s going to be the best way to find them. I can’t track the suits without Jarvis.” Tony closed his eyes, fighting off a wave of annoyance. He didn’t realize how much he relied on his AI until he was trying to work without it. Jarvis was in everything, it wasn’t any wonder someone targeted the computer system to take him to his knees. “The only MARK suit without him is-”

Tony sat up as a thought bolted through him.

“You have a suit that doesn’t run on Jarvis’s system?” Steve asked.

Yanking his phone out of his pocket, Tony dialed Rhodes’s number, “Yeah, one of my first. Except it’s called War Machine now.”

Chapter Six - LINK


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