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cherryTitle: Breakfast is the Most Important Meal
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cherryice
Fandom and Pairing: Avengers, Steve/Tony
Notes: I blamesilverakira and kuwdora for encouraging me when I said that Tony and Emma should be BFFs, then capslocking with me. I do however, thank them for their patience! Especially silverakira, as she was excellent enough to beta even after this got a little away on me. Contains references to PTSD and a canonical suicide attempt by a minor character.
Wordcount: 11,100
Summary: In which Steve is kind of a fossil but his squishy parts and feelings are still intact, Bruce hates blueberries, there's a mysterious banging coming from Tony's lab in the basement, and Emma Frost is not actually a stripper.
Also at the AO3.
Contrary to popular opinion, Steve Rogers is not, by nature, a morning person. He gets up early not because of any ingrained desire to greet the rising sun and not because of the Army; it’s what he’s conditioned himself to do his entire life, to get a head start on the day, and the Army only reinforced it. He doesn’t really need to run anymore either, not after the serum, but there’s something about the early morning streets falling away under his feet that lets him reacquaint himself with a body that sometimes still feels foreign, something about the slowly increasing concentration of futuristic cars and too-modern buildings that helps him truly wake up.
It’s no surprise then that he is not entirely aware when he returns to the Avengers mansion, listening for the harsh whistle of breath that doesn’t come from his chest, head still full of the overlapping languages that fill the streets of Manhattan markets in the mornings. Tony is sitting at the kitchen table. ’Sitting,’ for some definitions of the word, Steve thinks absently as he cracks a half dozen eggs into a frying pan. “Morning,” he says, nodding at Tony and the woman by the coffee maker. Tony is slouched onto the kitchen table, forehead pressed against the wood with only his shoulders and the top of his head visible, hair sticking out at wild angles. It’s a strange hour for Tony to be up here – he’s usually in bed, unconscious, or still in the lab from the night before.
“Want anything?” Steve asks as he drops bacon into a second pan. Tony only grunts in return. The one downside to his physical enhancements – and Steve really hates to think of it as an inconvenience at all, because really, he doesn’t have any call to complain – is the enhanced metabolism that comes with it. He burns a lot of calories. He’s pretty sure he should start eating before he goes for a run, with his glycogen stores so low from fasting through the night, but there’s a part of him that remembers war-time rationing and the scarcity of the Depression, and still quails from the amount of food he consumes. The smell of coffee brewing and bacon sizzling finally hits his brain and he’s famished. “Tony? Food?” Because Tony needs to eat more, Steve thinks with a frown.
Tony grunts again. “He’s fine,” the woman by the coffee maker says, except now she’s the woman at the kitchen table, as she sets one of two cups of coffee down in front of Tony’s head. His hands shoot up from under the table instantly, wrapping around the mug and clinging. The other she sets down at Steve’s side, and he nods his thanks as he hovers over the stove, stomach growling. She’s dressed all in white, where she’s dressed, and drinking something red that Steve thinks is probably not a virgin Bloody Mary. His coffee is black and perfectly sweet.
“Come now,” she says, standing imperiously by Tony.
“Don’t wanna,” he says, voice muffled by the table.
“Now.”
“Emmmmma,” he whines.
“I’m sorry,” she says, one sharp eyebrow raised. “Did you think you had a choice in the matter?”
Tony sways upright as Steve transfers his breakfast to his plate. “Too early,” Tony says. The arc reactor in his chest glows blue through his thin white tank. Steve’s thinking about caloric expenditures and recent patterns in gang violence and if there’s a league of super villains that requires you to have an absurd villain name as they leave.
“Too bad, darling,” the woman – Emma, his lizard brain supplies – as they disappear down the hall. Her boots manage to somehow clack even through the carpet. “You get what you pay for.”
Steve is on his third (maybe overfull) mouthful of eggs when he pauses. Stops with one hand wrapped around the coffee cup and his fork half way to his mouth and reruns his morning. “Wait,” he says. Blinks owlishly as glucose hits his brain and the last ten minutes – and the woman’s lack of clothing – catch up with him. “Why was there a stripper in the kitchen?”
*
It’s not actually like this is unprecedented. Somehow, Tony’s parties seem to accumulate strippers, or at least lovely young ladies who decide as the evening goes on that they’d like to exchange their clothes for cash (or sometimes they’re young men, but Steve tries not to think about that or the tips of his ears turn red). Steve’s been on Tony’s plane, and he really doesn’t buy the smirking explanation that the poles are load-bearing, for structural support. Or for if you want a workout during a long intercontinental flight.
“Do you really expect me to believe that?” he'd asked Tony with a frown.
Tony smirked. “Helps me work,” he said, spreading his arms wide across the back of the leather seats and kicking his feet up onto the cushions. “We all multitask,” he said, face a study in fake innocence. “Except I’m kind of a genius. So I have to multitask more than most people in order to pay attention.”
“You realize that doesn’t make any sense, right?” Steve asked, frowning at Tony’s shoes kicked up on the seat.
“Hey, who’s the genius here?”
“Your shirt’s on inside out,” Steve said helpfully. He was pretty sure Tony just liked naked people. And being scandalous.
*
The stripper - Emma – is in the kitchen again the next morning, having mimosas with Bruce and Natasha. Tony is listing sideways in his chair with a cup of coffee clutched tightly to his chest.
It’s not like Steve had spent most of the day before thinking about it (it may have popped into his mind occasionally, like when he was going through the endless files on potential allies and enemies or running drills with SHIELD trainees or eating supper or watching the news) but if he had, he would have decided to chalk the entire incident up to Tony being Tony. And with Tony’s attention span for things he can’t weld or reduce to 0s and 1s, well. If Steve had been thinking about it, he would have assumed he wouldn’t have to think about it again today.
Emma is dressed all in white again, leather and satin that doesn’t leave much to the imagination. She raises an eyebrow at him as she catches his eyes as they drift upwards, and Steve feels himself redden. “Breakfast?” he asks as he roots around in the fridge, face hot.
“Any yogurt?” Bruce asks.
Steve pulls the container out of the fridge and hands it over.
“Ooooh, strawberry,” Bruce says, as if he’s not aware that’s all they keep after the blueberry yogurt incident.
At the table, Tony’s eyes are starting to open past shuttered slits. Bruce sits back down at the table, digging into the container with a spoon as Natasha and Emma sip from champagne flutes and eat toast. Clint shuffles in and nods at the table. Steve stands in front of the open fridge door with an egg carton in his hands, staring at the kitchen and wondering if he’s going around the bend. Clint reaches past him into the fridge and pulls out the milk.
Right.
He moves mechanically as he starts putting things into the frying pan. Emma is once again shepherding Tony from the kitchen and down the hall. This time, she appears to be doing it solely with imperious glances and crossed arms. Clint watches her go intently, grin morphing into a leer when she turns to catch his eye. He doesn’t redden like Steve did. Emma and Natasha appear to exchange some form of silent communication that involves eyebrows and frightening grins. Tony continues to shamble down the hall, and Clint tries hard not to look like he’s afraid of the quirk of Natasha’s lips.
“Good yogurt,” Bruce says. “Wait, is that a blueberry?”
*
Steve doesn’t see either of them for the rest of the day. Which isn’t unusual when it comes to Tony, really, but he’s not usually actively looking for him. Not that Steve is actually actively looking for them, or anything. They’re both consenting adults, and he’d gotten that speech from the orientation team as part of his introduction to the 21st century. Then he’d gotten it from Coulson. And Pepper. Pepper’s had probably been the scariest. Sometimes he feels like everyone’s just waiting for him to say something horribly offensive, but while the world might have changed a lot, he’s pretty sure it’s all for the better. (Or mostly. He’s not sure about Twitter or TMZ. Sometimes he feels helplessly old-fashioned, and ashamed of the things he’s surprised by, but he’s working on it.)
When Steve finally tracks down Tony and Emma, they’re in his lab. When they weren’t anywhere else he kept looking, but he assumed – he assumed that Tony wouldn’t have let her down there. Brought her down there.
He peers through the glass door, not sure what he’s going to see. Tony has a welding helmet pushed up on his head and is gesticulating wildly. Emma is sitting on one of the tables, one elegant leg crossed over the other, the blue light of holographic designs casting light and shadows across her white hair and skin. She’s wearing as many clothes as she was at breakfast, which is to say, not too terribly many. There’s something almost innocuous about the scene, and Steve feels a rush of relief that he can’t quite place, at least until he looks a little more closely. Tony’s supposed to be working on suit upgrades.
By the looks of it, he is.
Steve knocks on the glass, somewhat harder than he means to. It rattles. Tony looks over and waves at him. ’Come on in,’ he mouths. Steve shakes his head and lets his still-raised hand drop to his side, fisted tightly. Steve steps back away from the glass, where he can’t be seen from inside, and waits for Tony to come to him. He’s probably wrong. Tony can be reckless, but he’s not usually irresponsible.
Not this irresponsible, anyway.
Or, all right, not this irresponsible in this way. The Air Force may have ended up with one of Tony’s suits, covered with guns, through a set of circumstances no one will explain to Steve beyond ’Well, you see, Tony – Tony, well’ and something about a watermelon, but that at least involved someone with full clearance.
Steve’s pretty sure the chances of mind control being involved are slim.
“Hey,” Tony says. “What do you need? There’s not some sort of alien squid attack going on, is there?”
Steve is surprised to find Tony already in front of him; Tony is never what one would call subtle, and seemingly incapable of moving without a surrounding cloud of babble or snapping fingers or loud music. “No,” he says. “No squid.” Steve realizes he was waiting for the jarring blast of discordant music to come spilling from the open door to indicate that Tony had left the lab. Sloppy on his part, he thinks.
Tony is stripping off his machinist’s gloves. “Shrimp?”
“No shellfish or sea creatures.” Steve finds himself drawn to the contrast of the paleness of Tony’s lower forearms against the smudges of grease and dirt above the line of the gloves.
“It’s not Loki again, is it? Because I hate magic.”
Steve’s jaw clenches. “No. Just wanted to check in on the suit upgrades. ”
Tony frowns. “Working on it. What, is Hawkeye whining about more bow upgrades already? Does Fury want a floating aircraft carrier again? Because I’ve told him that it’s going to take way more than –”
“Does Coulson know?” Steve asks. Smoothes his hands against the front of his blue jeans. It still surprises him sometimes, how much more tactile he is, how each of his senses is just that much sharper. The weave of denim against his fingertips. The iron-cordite-engine oil-solder smell of Tony, the faint crisp overlay of Emma’s perfume.
Tony blinks. “Right,” he says. “Okay, first of all,” Tony says, “yes, I assume so, even though it’s none of his business. I didn’t exactly wait until he was engrossed in Super Nanny and sneak her in through the servant’s entrance.”
Steve blinks. “You have a servant’s entrance?”
“What, no, of course I don’t.” Tony pauses. “Seriously?”
“It’s not like you let us be unaware of the fact that you’re rich.”
“Okay, you missed a word there, and that work was ’filthy.’ ’Filthy rich.’ Who has servants these days, anyway? ’Help,’ maybe. I prefer interns, to be honest.” Tony stops, shakes his head. “And, secondly. I don’t know if you’ve forgotten – and it seems like you haven’t, what with the servant’s entrance thing – but this is my house. I let you all live here. It’s not like I don’t get to bring whomever I want in.”
Except. “It kind of is,” Steve says. There are three pizza places in the entire city cleared to deliver to the front foyer of the mansion. (Only one is willing to. There have been incidents. Thor likes pineapple on his pizza, and gets sad if there are sardines with little faces. Clint’s opinions run opposite. Things have gotten heated.) “She’s –”
“You’re going to want to stop right there,” Tony says, eyes flickering.
And Steve is just so entirely lost because Tony is a squirrelly bastard at the best of times, doesn’t trust the team or even himself half to three quarters of the time, but he’s terrible at looking at himself. “You can’t just let anyone in here,” Steve says. What if she’s after corporate secrets? What if she’s part of one of those villainous clubs that requires really awful nicknames? “You don’t know what could –”
Tony laughs with a smile that’s almost blank and dark eyes. “Oh, I’m aware,” he says. “She’s got clearance. Look, your concern is cute, really. Practically adorable. But if there’s nothing else, I’m just gonna –”
Tony’s gone already, workshop door closing behind him, leaving Steve standing there, caught somewhere between anger and confusion.
Through the glass door, he can see Emma still sitting there, head cocked as holograms play across her face. He could almost swear she looks disappointed in him.
*
“Yes, I’m aware,” Fury says without looking up from his desk.
Steve stands uncertainly in the doorway.
“Yes, I’m aware, no, I don’t approve, but yes, again, her clearance is valid.”
Steve clears his throat. “She’s –”
“Done some sensitive work for us in the past, and they go back a ways, so how I feel about her doesn’t really matter right now,” Fury says, finally looking up to where Steve is standing at attention.
Steve clears his throat. “Right. Sir.” He’s not sure he wants to know exactly what kind of work she’s done for them.
There’s a soft knock at the door, and a SHIELD agent sticks her head in. “Director Fury?” she asks, entering at Fury’s nod and handing him a red file.
Fury curses under his breath a bit. “I’m a bit surprised at you, though,” he says, almost proudly, looking up at Steve before turning back to the folder.
“Sir,” Steve says, taking it as the dismissal it is.
*
It’s not that Steve has a problem with strippers. They’re people who make a living taking off their clothes. Steve is someone who makes a living putting on ridiculous clothes and punching people in the face, so it’s not like he has a lot of room to talk.
He just – doesn’t get it. He wonders if this is part of the thing where Tony sometimes feels the need to pay people to be his friends. He wonders why she gets to waltz right in when it took him so long to find any sort of equilibrium with Tony, some balance where one or the other of them wasn’t lashing out with sarcasm and/or hiding in the lab (the majority of both behaviours actually being attributable to Tony).
He asked Pepper once if dealing with Tony was one of those things about the modern world he was learning. She laughed and told him that the modern world still hadn’t figured out how to deal with Tony.
Steve is pretty sure Fury had approved of his distrust of Emma, and he isn’t quite sure how that makes him feel. Actually, he’s pretty sure he feels like crap, but he’d like to think that wasn’t based on Nick Fury’s approval. She has security clearance. She is Tony’s – friend, or something like it.
He makes her pancakes. She doesn’t actually know that he thought she might be some sort of evil spy. Or seducing Tony into showing her details of the Iron Man armour. Which. His imagination might be getting away from him.
He’s cooked about half of them when she wanders into the kitchen the next morning, and once again raises that eyebrow when he slides a plate in front of her. “Sorry,” he says. “I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Steve.”
She looks incredulous, but shakes his hand when he offers it, “Emma,” she says, and he thinks he sees her trying not to laugh. Tony, when he wanders upstairs, seems to shake himself awake as he stares at the two of them talking in horrified fascination, before dragging Emma almost bodily from the room.
“Tony!” he calls after them. His eyebrows are drawn together. “That’s no way to treat a lady!”
As the elevator door slams shut, he’s pretty sure Tony collapses against her in laughter.
Half an hour later, the banging starts.
*
There’s banging drifting up from the workshop the next day.
And the day after that.
*
Steve has never considered himself to be easily distracted. The intermittent banging, however, is driving him to the end of his rope. Even when he’s not at the mansion. Someone drops something at SHIELD HQ and it’s his first thought. He’d like to think that it’s the noise itself, but it’s not. It’s the – the images. He tries not to wonder what on earth they’re doing to make that sort of racket. Steve hasn’t had a chance to get a lot of experience, and he just – he’s read the papers, and he knows Tony’s background. And Emma seems like the sort of dame who’s had her fair share of experience.
(They’re probably spectacular together.)
He feels like a voyeur.
It’s a relief of sorts when Pepper shows up. Her heels are much more silent on the hardwood floor than Emma’s manage to be on carpet, so he’s starting to think it’s a choice on her part.
(It was bad when Tony and Pepper broke up. Pepper went away for a while, and they’d thought Tony had done the same until Bruce mentioned something about his having being in the basement for the last week. Then there was the intervention. Apparently Thor had wanted to perform the Midgardian ritual since he’d seen Intervention on television. It had taken them a while to explain to him that Tony wasn’t actually having Pepper withdrawal, and that Thor could take off the fake Jeff VanVonderen moustache any time.
“I CANNOT, FRIENDS!” Thor had boomed. “I HAVE GLUED IT TO MY FACE FOR MAXIMUM AUTHENTICITY.”
Tony ended up crying with what was probably laughter, but at least it was a step forward. Tony sometimes still looks at Pepper with something like reverence, like he can’t believe she’s still his friend.)
“He’s in the basement?” Pepper asks. She’s got a sheaf of documents under her arm and a frazzled look on her face. Steve’s pretty certain he’s never thought about what Tony’s scarred hands would look like against her pale skin.
Pretty sure.
“Basement?” Pepper repeats as Steve blinks guiltily. Something down there crashes and she sighs. “Of course.” She pulls out her tablet and starts flipping rapidly through documents.
Steve reaches out instinctively to grab her arm as she heads for the hall. “You, um. Might want to wait. He’s got company.” He can feel his face colour as he releases her arm. He doesn’t know what the rules are for this. If Pepper is allowed to know about Tony’s sudden attachment to a particular stripper. If she wants to know. Pepper seems to have taken the break-up on a slightly more even keel than Tony, but Steve usually think that’s because Pepper as a whole is on a much more even keel than Tony.
Pepper looks up. “Is Emma in?”
“Yes?” Steve offers, wincing as something bangs loudly.
“Oh, good,” Pepper replies. “I wanted to see her, too.”
“Oh,” Steve says. Pepper is usually the one ushering out people covered with glitter, with her back straight and lips ever so slightly compressed, so that’s not exactly what he was expecting. But Fury implied that Emma and Tony went back, so it’s entirely possible that Pepper and Emma are already – familiar.
Pepper tucks her tablet and the folders against her navy-clad hip. “Tony was just the tiiiniest bit stuck until she agreed to clear her schedule and work out here for a bit. Not that he’d admit it.” Something crashes loudly again, and she sighs in exasperation. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and see what they’re doing.”
And just like that, she’s heading for the basement. Steve stays where he is, standing stock still, because that’s not what he was expecting at all. The banging stops for a few minutes, then starts up again at what he’s pretty sure is higher volume. He sits down carefully and puts his head in his hands.
Just when he thinks he’s got this century figured out.
*
The thing is, Steve’s trying not to think about why this bothers him so much. He’s trying not to think about it because he may be old-fashioned, but he’s not stupid, and he gets it. It takes more than a few months to erase a lifetime of social conditioning, no matter how much you might be consciously aware of it. He knows he thinks about Tony more than he probably should; about the crinkles at the corners of his eyes and the curve of his shoulder muscles arcing into a neck that always looks corded with tension, about the shadow of stubble that ghosts his jaw when he’s been up all night.
It has less to do with Tony and more to do with the fact that Tony is the first guy he’s actually let himself think of this way. (It being thinking about Tony. Or thinking about thinking about Tony. Steve thinks, anyways.) And Steve feels almost like he’s taking advantage of him. That he’s making assumptions because of Tony’s reputation, and the fact that Tony apparently sometimes like men that way. With the fact that if you want to get technical, Steve’s the team lead and Tony is a subordinate in their quasi-military set up, though he’s pretty sure Tony would laugh himself sick over the idea. (He doesn’t think Pepper would, though, which gives him pause.)
It’s not about Emma at all.
*
Steve overcompensates. Tony asks him if he wants to grab a burger one day, coffee the next, pizza, and Steve makes sure to invite Emma. There’s a flicker in Tony’s eyes when Steve does that, and his grin becomes forced, like he knows what Steve’s overcompensating for – or he thinks Steve is judging, and Steve’s not sure which would be worse; Steve wants to say something but he has no idea what that would be. Instead, he pulls out Emma’s chair for her and stares down at his hands and tries not to feel small.
*
It turns out that the fact that Steve’s trying not to think about it means that he’s really not thinking about it. At all. He’s not thinking about things in the most spectacular of manners, as becomes abundantly clear to him while they’re fighting bear-sized mechanical kittens on the lower East Side.
The kittens aren’t the most destructive things they’ve faced, not by a long shot, but they are having a bit of a hard time taking them out. Hawkeye’s arrows have a tendency to get vaporized by the green laser beams the kittens shoot from their eyes before they hit their targets, and even with all Natasha’s ninja-like skills, she appears to be having a hard time finding the important robot-y parts under the fur.
Apparently, the Hulk is allergic to cats.
Thor keeps trying to pet them in the hopes of finding one that would make an appropriate steed. He only smashes them with the hammer after they respond to his advances with an attempt to eat him. Steve is mainly afraid that one will actually befriend him and Thor will try to bring it back to the mansion, where Tony will destroy it in a way that makes Thor make that sad face that Steve tells himself he is in no way affected by.
Speaking of. “Iron Man, what’s your ETA?” he yells into the comm, vaulting over a park bench. He tucks into a forward roll as he comes down, heels hot from narrowly-avoided laser beam blasts.
“Less than five minutes,” Tony’s voice comes. He chuckles, low. “Don’t tell me Captain America needs to be rescued from a bunch of kitty cats?”
“Just get here,” Steve grits out, whipping his shield around to catch a paw swipe that knocks him back into a tree.
“Hulk no wike fwuffy kitties!” Hulk yells, eyes red and swollen as he smashes – someone’s car.
Steve winces.
“Control module is in the back of the neck!” Natasha yells, holding something pulsing red and silver over her head as the cat she’s crouched atop of crashes to the ground with a hole in its neck.
“Got it!” Steve yells, adds: “got that everyone?” into his communicator.
“Incoming!” Tony’s voice sounds in his ear and he looks up to see Iron Man arcing in towards them. Steve has a moment to notice that the suit appears to be carrying something. Something humanoid and made of glass. Steve dodges under another paw swipe as Iron Man releases what he’s carrying. It resolves itself into a human shape as it falls, arms outstretched to control the descent. Steve rolls backwards out of the robot’s reach and has just enough time to wonder why Iron Man is carrying someone (who isn’t him) before the figure crashes down on top of the robot kitten at near-terminal velocity, sending fur and giant kitten limbs flying everywhere and shaking the ground. It’s a female figure that climbs out of the impact crater and robot remains, scowling at the fluff and motor oil that coats her glittering surface.
“You all right, ma’am?” he asks, just to be sure, because, well. Impact crater.
“Yes, yes, fine,” she says dismissively, and whips the robot kitten sneaking up on her halfway down the block.
She looks familiar, but Steve’s pretty busy dodging another one of the cats. It doesn’t take too much longer after that; they know what to go for to take out the control centre so he starts taking them out with a hurled shield while Black Widow and the new woman rip them out. Iron Man picks them off from above, Thor has stopped trying to make them his friends and is just hitting them with his hammer in a way that is rather reminiscent of little bunny Foo Foo, and Hawkeye has taken to pointing the Hulk at things that are actually robots and then letting him go.
There’s a pretty good crowd gathered by the time they’re done. Apparently, mechanical kittens are not above the threat level that sends civilians actually scurrying for cover, even if the kitten are bear-sized and shoot lasers. The air is full of cat fur and fluff, and the Hulk is sitting sadly on the corner across from the park, sniffling and sneezing gigantic sneezes that lift him right off the ground.
The glass woman stands at the edge of the grass, surveying everything with crossed arms. Steve walks over to her, glittering white and semi-transparent, flashbulb from the reporters flickering strangely through her body. Not glass, his hindbrain supplies. Diamond. Organic diamond. Which means –
“Good thing they look like robots when you smash them open,” Iron Man says as he lands besides Steve. Steve’s stomach is turning slow lazy circles. “Instead of organic, bloody fluffy balls of death.”
“Can you imagine the publicity, if Fluffy were spread gorily about the block?” Emma replies. “I doubt it would do any good for either of our company’s stocks.”
*
Emma.
Emma Frost.
Co-headmaster of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. CEO of Frost International.
Not actually a stripper.
Steve stands there, staring at a metal spine with wires sparking sullenly against the sidewalk. Low level SHIELD agents are starting to move into the area, collecting debris. The rest of the Avengers gather in around Steve, Tony, and Emma. Bruce is back but his face is still swollen, eyes red, and sneezing miserably. No one else seems surprised to see Emma there, or to see her flicker back into flesh and blood.
“Let’s all agree not to do that ever again,” Clint says.
The press is even more excited than normal.
“How do you justify this blatant cruelty towards robo-animals? Are you at all concerned about PETA’s response?”
“Captain America! Who was the mysterious woman you were seen speaking with in a grocery store at 2:14 AM last Thursday?”
“Are the X-Men and the Avengers forming some sort of combined super team?”
“How do you justify working with any part of the mutant menace?”
“Why aren’t there any mutants on the roster of the Avengers? What sort of a message does that send to young mutants?”
“Well, this has been great,” Tony says, finally. “But, busy people, lots to do. Companies to run, genius inventions to create, small countries to save, that sort of thing. Wanna ride?” he asks, turning to the group.
Steve’s about to reply that yes, he’d love a lift back to the mansion when he realizes Tony’s talking to Emma. He closes his mouth again as she nods, and steps onto one of Tony’s boots as he tips his visor back closed. She shifts back into her diamond form as they blast off, and Steve tells himself that it is ridiculous to be jealous that Tony is carrying someone who is not him.
*
It’s probably the ex-super villain thing that they thought he was freaking out over, Steve realizes in the car on the way back to the mansion. That’s what Fury thought Steve was warning him about. Why Tony thought Steve was asking about Emma’s security clearance. When she was a supervillain she designed her own version of Cerebro, and created a gun capable of switching people’s consciousness between bodies, so she’s actually probably exactly the person Tony would want to help him to work on neurological interfaces for the suit. So she was actually helping with the suit, because Tony’s an engineer, and physics and mechanics only go so far. It’s a good thing that no one knows what he was thinking when –
Except, Emma’s a telepath.
Steve lets his head bang forward against the dashboard.
“What is the problem, my friend?” Thor asks from the back seat. He leans forward. “Are you much saddened by the loss of our potential kitten steeds?”
“No, Thor,” Steve says, and shakes his head as much as he can while still resting it against the dash. Emma Frost.
"Yes!" Thor proclaims. It appears Steve might have said that out loud. Thor beams as Steve as he continues. "Tony’s woman of ice was indeed of great help! And of great use as an aerial bombast!"
Coulson, driving, says, “Pay up.” Steve turns his head to see Coulson snapping his fingers over his shoulder at Natasha in the back.
“Fine,” she says, and pulls a few bills from – somewhere, she pulls them from somewhere, and Steve still hasn’t figured out how she gets herself into her uniform, let alone anything else in there with her. “I can’t believe you actually won with ’during a fight with dinosaurs or robot animals.’” She frowns at Steve as she hands them to Coulson. "You couldn’t have held off on the realization until a society function?"
Thor frowns. "Do you think that she would deign to allow me to hurl her at our enemies, should an opportune occasion arise?"
Steve covers his face with his hands and doesn’t look up for the rest of the ride.
Part 2
Author:
cherryiceFandom and Pairing: Avengers, Steve/Tony
Notes: I blame
silverakira and kuwdora for encouraging me when I said that Tony and Emma should be BFFs, then capslocking with me. I do however, thank them for their patience! Especially silverakira, as she was excellent enough to beta even after this got a little away on me. Contains references to PTSD and a canonical suicide attempt by a minor character.Wordcount: 11,100
Summary: In which Steve is kind of a fossil but his squishy parts and feelings are still intact, Bruce hates blueberries, there's a mysterious banging coming from Tony's lab in the basement, and Emma Frost is not actually a stripper.
Also at the AO3.
Contrary to popular opinion, Steve Rogers is not, by nature, a morning person. He gets up early not because of any ingrained desire to greet the rising sun and not because of the Army; it’s what he’s conditioned himself to do his entire life, to get a head start on the day, and the Army only reinforced it. He doesn’t really need to run anymore either, not after the serum, but there’s something about the early morning streets falling away under his feet that lets him reacquaint himself with a body that sometimes still feels foreign, something about the slowly increasing concentration of futuristic cars and too-modern buildings that helps him truly wake up.
It’s no surprise then that he is not entirely aware when he returns to the Avengers mansion, listening for the harsh whistle of breath that doesn’t come from his chest, head still full of the overlapping languages that fill the streets of Manhattan markets in the mornings. Tony is sitting at the kitchen table. ’Sitting,’ for some definitions of the word, Steve thinks absently as he cracks a half dozen eggs into a frying pan. “Morning,” he says, nodding at Tony and the woman by the coffee maker. Tony is slouched onto the kitchen table, forehead pressed against the wood with only his shoulders and the top of his head visible, hair sticking out at wild angles. It’s a strange hour for Tony to be up here – he’s usually in bed, unconscious, or still in the lab from the night before.
“Want anything?” Steve asks as he drops bacon into a second pan. Tony only grunts in return. The one downside to his physical enhancements – and Steve really hates to think of it as an inconvenience at all, because really, he doesn’t have any call to complain – is the enhanced metabolism that comes with it. He burns a lot of calories. He’s pretty sure he should start eating before he goes for a run, with his glycogen stores so low from fasting through the night, but there’s a part of him that remembers war-time rationing and the scarcity of the Depression, and still quails from the amount of food he consumes. The smell of coffee brewing and bacon sizzling finally hits his brain and he’s famished. “Tony? Food?” Because Tony needs to eat more, Steve thinks with a frown.
Tony grunts again. “He’s fine,” the woman by the coffee maker says, except now she’s the woman at the kitchen table, as she sets one of two cups of coffee down in front of Tony’s head. His hands shoot up from under the table instantly, wrapping around the mug and clinging. The other she sets down at Steve’s side, and he nods his thanks as he hovers over the stove, stomach growling. She’s dressed all in white, where she’s dressed, and drinking something red that Steve thinks is probably not a virgin Bloody Mary. His coffee is black and perfectly sweet.
“Come now,” she says, standing imperiously by Tony.
“Don’t wanna,” he says, voice muffled by the table.
“Now.”
“Emmmmma,” he whines.
“I’m sorry,” she says, one sharp eyebrow raised. “Did you think you had a choice in the matter?”
Tony sways upright as Steve transfers his breakfast to his plate. “Too early,” Tony says. The arc reactor in his chest glows blue through his thin white tank. Steve’s thinking about caloric expenditures and recent patterns in gang violence and if there’s a league of super villains that requires you to have an absurd villain name as they leave.
“Too bad, darling,” the woman – Emma, his lizard brain supplies – as they disappear down the hall. Her boots manage to somehow clack even through the carpet. “You get what you pay for.”
Steve is on his third (maybe overfull) mouthful of eggs when he pauses. Stops with one hand wrapped around the coffee cup and his fork half way to his mouth and reruns his morning. “Wait,” he says. Blinks owlishly as glucose hits his brain and the last ten minutes – and the woman’s lack of clothing – catch up with him. “Why was there a stripper in the kitchen?”
*
It’s not actually like this is unprecedented. Somehow, Tony’s parties seem to accumulate strippers, or at least lovely young ladies who decide as the evening goes on that they’d like to exchange their clothes for cash (or sometimes they’re young men, but Steve tries not to think about that or the tips of his ears turn red). Steve’s been on Tony’s plane, and he really doesn’t buy the smirking explanation that the poles are load-bearing, for structural support. Or for if you want a workout during a long intercontinental flight.
“Do you really expect me to believe that?” he'd asked Tony with a frown.
Tony smirked. “Helps me work,” he said, spreading his arms wide across the back of the leather seats and kicking his feet up onto the cushions. “We all multitask,” he said, face a study in fake innocence. “Except I’m kind of a genius. So I have to multitask more than most people in order to pay attention.”
“You realize that doesn’t make any sense, right?” Steve asked, frowning at Tony’s shoes kicked up on the seat.
“Hey, who’s the genius here?”
“Your shirt’s on inside out,” Steve said helpfully. He was pretty sure Tony just liked naked people. And being scandalous.
*
The stripper - Emma – is in the kitchen again the next morning, having mimosas with Bruce and Natasha. Tony is listing sideways in his chair with a cup of coffee clutched tightly to his chest.
It’s not like Steve had spent most of the day before thinking about it (it may have popped into his mind occasionally, like when he was going through the endless files on potential allies and enemies or running drills with SHIELD trainees or eating supper or watching the news) but if he had, he would have decided to chalk the entire incident up to Tony being Tony. And with Tony’s attention span for things he can’t weld or reduce to 0s and 1s, well. If Steve had been thinking about it, he would have assumed he wouldn’t have to think about it again today.
Emma is dressed all in white again, leather and satin that doesn’t leave much to the imagination. She raises an eyebrow at him as she catches his eyes as they drift upwards, and Steve feels himself redden. “Breakfast?” he asks as he roots around in the fridge, face hot.
“Any yogurt?” Bruce asks.
Steve pulls the container out of the fridge and hands it over.
“Ooooh, strawberry,” Bruce says, as if he’s not aware that’s all they keep after the blueberry yogurt incident.
At the table, Tony’s eyes are starting to open past shuttered slits. Bruce sits back down at the table, digging into the container with a spoon as Natasha and Emma sip from champagne flutes and eat toast. Clint shuffles in and nods at the table. Steve stands in front of the open fridge door with an egg carton in his hands, staring at the kitchen and wondering if he’s going around the bend. Clint reaches past him into the fridge and pulls out the milk.
Right.
He moves mechanically as he starts putting things into the frying pan. Emma is once again shepherding Tony from the kitchen and down the hall. This time, she appears to be doing it solely with imperious glances and crossed arms. Clint watches her go intently, grin morphing into a leer when she turns to catch his eye. He doesn’t redden like Steve did. Emma and Natasha appear to exchange some form of silent communication that involves eyebrows and frightening grins. Tony continues to shamble down the hall, and Clint tries hard not to look like he’s afraid of the quirk of Natasha’s lips.
“Good yogurt,” Bruce says. “Wait, is that a blueberry?”
*
Steve doesn’t see either of them for the rest of the day. Which isn’t unusual when it comes to Tony, really, but he’s not usually actively looking for him. Not that Steve is actually actively looking for them, or anything. They’re both consenting adults, and he’d gotten that speech from the orientation team as part of his introduction to the 21st century. Then he’d gotten it from Coulson. And Pepper. Pepper’s had probably been the scariest. Sometimes he feels like everyone’s just waiting for him to say something horribly offensive, but while the world might have changed a lot, he’s pretty sure it’s all for the better. (Or mostly. He’s not sure about Twitter or TMZ. Sometimes he feels helplessly old-fashioned, and ashamed of the things he’s surprised by, but he’s working on it.)
When Steve finally tracks down Tony and Emma, they’re in his lab. When they weren’t anywhere else he kept looking, but he assumed – he assumed that Tony wouldn’t have let her down there. Brought her down there.
He peers through the glass door, not sure what he’s going to see. Tony has a welding helmet pushed up on his head and is gesticulating wildly. Emma is sitting on one of the tables, one elegant leg crossed over the other, the blue light of holographic designs casting light and shadows across her white hair and skin. She’s wearing as many clothes as she was at breakfast, which is to say, not too terribly many. There’s something almost innocuous about the scene, and Steve feels a rush of relief that he can’t quite place, at least until he looks a little more closely. Tony’s supposed to be working on suit upgrades.
By the looks of it, he is.
Steve knocks on the glass, somewhat harder than he means to. It rattles. Tony looks over and waves at him. ’Come on in,’ he mouths. Steve shakes his head and lets his still-raised hand drop to his side, fisted tightly. Steve steps back away from the glass, where he can’t be seen from inside, and waits for Tony to come to him. He’s probably wrong. Tony can be reckless, but he’s not usually irresponsible.
Not this irresponsible, anyway.
Or, all right, not this irresponsible in this way. The Air Force may have ended up with one of Tony’s suits, covered with guns, through a set of circumstances no one will explain to Steve beyond ’Well, you see, Tony – Tony, well’ and something about a watermelon, but that at least involved someone with full clearance.
Steve’s pretty sure the chances of mind control being involved are slim.
“Hey,” Tony says. “What do you need? There’s not some sort of alien squid attack going on, is there?”
Steve is surprised to find Tony already in front of him; Tony is never what one would call subtle, and seemingly incapable of moving without a surrounding cloud of babble or snapping fingers or loud music. “No,” he says. “No squid.” Steve realizes he was waiting for the jarring blast of discordant music to come spilling from the open door to indicate that Tony had left the lab. Sloppy on his part, he thinks.
Tony is stripping off his machinist’s gloves. “Shrimp?”
“No shellfish or sea creatures.” Steve finds himself drawn to the contrast of the paleness of Tony’s lower forearms against the smudges of grease and dirt above the line of the gloves.
“It’s not Loki again, is it? Because I hate magic.”
Steve’s jaw clenches. “No. Just wanted to check in on the suit upgrades. ”
Tony frowns. “Working on it. What, is Hawkeye whining about more bow upgrades already? Does Fury want a floating aircraft carrier again? Because I’ve told him that it’s going to take way more than –”
“Does Coulson know?” Steve asks. Smoothes his hands against the front of his blue jeans. It still surprises him sometimes, how much more tactile he is, how each of his senses is just that much sharper. The weave of denim against his fingertips. The iron-cordite-engine oil-solder smell of Tony, the faint crisp overlay of Emma’s perfume.
Tony blinks. “Right,” he says. “Okay, first of all,” Tony says, “yes, I assume so, even though it’s none of his business. I didn’t exactly wait until he was engrossed in Super Nanny and sneak her in through the servant’s entrance.”
Steve blinks. “You have a servant’s entrance?”
“What, no, of course I don’t.” Tony pauses. “Seriously?”
“It’s not like you let us be unaware of the fact that you’re rich.”
“Okay, you missed a word there, and that work was ’filthy.’ ’Filthy rich.’ Who has servants these days, anyway? ’Help,’ maybe. I prefer interns, to be honest.” Tony stops, shakes his head. “And, secondly. I don’t know if you’ve forgotten – and it seems like you haven’t, what with the servant’s entrance thing – but this is my house. I let you all live here. It’s not like I don’t get to bring whomever I want in.”
Except. “It kind of is,” Steve says. There are three pizza places in the entire city cleared to deliver to the front foyer of the mansion. (Only one is willing to. There have been incidents. Thor likes pineapple on his pizza, and gets sad if there are sardines with little faces. Clint’s opinions run opposite. Things have gotten heated.) “She’s –”
“You’re going to want to stop right there,” Tony says, eyes flickering.
And Steve is just so entirely lost because Tony is a squirrelly bastard at the best of times, doesn’t trust the team or even himself half to three quarters of the time, but he’s terrible at looking at himself. “You can’t just let anyone in here,” Steve says. What if she’s after corporate secrets? What if she’s part of one of those villainous clubs that requires really awful nicknames? “You don’t know what could –”
Tony laughs with a smile that’s almost blank and dark eyes. “Oh, I’m aware,” he says. “She’s got clearance. Look, your concern is cute, really. Practically adorable. But if there’s nothing else, I’m just gonna –”
Tony’s gone already, workshop door closing behind him, leaving Steve standing there, caught somewhere between anger and confusion.
Through the glass door, he can see Emma still sitting there, head cocked as holograms play across her face. He could almost swear she looks disappointed in him.
*
“Yes, I’m aware,” Fury says without looking up from his desk.
Steve stands uncertainly in the doorway.
“Yes, I’m aware, no, I don’t approve, but yes, again, her clearance is valid.”
Steve clears his throat. “She’s –”
“Done some sensitive work for us in the past, and they go back a ways, so how I feel about her doesn’t really matter right now,” Fury says, finally looking up to where Steve is standing at attention.
Steve clears his throat. “Right. Sir.” He’s not sure he wants to know exactly what kind of work she’s done for them.
There’s a soft knock at the door, and a SHIELD agent sticks her head in. “Director Fury?” she asks, entering at Fury’s nod and handing him a red file.
Fury curses under his breath a bit. “I’m a bit surprised at you, though,” he says, almost proudly, looking up at Steve before turning back to the folder.
“Sir,” Steve says, taking it as the dismissal it is.
*
It’s not that Steve has a problem with strippers. They’re people who make a living taking off their clothes. Steve is someone who makes a living putting on ridiculous clothes and punching people in the face, so it’s not like he has a lot of room to talk.
He just – doesn’t get it. He wonders if this is part of the thing where Tony sometimes feels the need to pay people to be his friends. He wonders why she gets to waltz right in when it took him so long to find any sort of equilibrium with Tony, some balance where one or the other of them wasn’t lashing out with sarcasm and/or hiding in the lab (the majority of both behaviours actually being attributable to Tony).
He asked Pepper once if dealing with Tony was one of those things about the modern world he was learning. She laughed and told him that the modern world still hadn’t figured out how to deal with Tony.
Steve is pretty sure Fury had approved of his distrust of Emma, and he isn’t quite sure how that makes him feel. Actually, he’s pretty sure he feels like crap, but he’d like to think that wasn’t based on Nick Fury’s approval. She has security clearance. She is Tony’s – friend, or something like it.
He makes her pancakes. She doesn’t actually know that he thought she might be some sort of evil spy. Or seducing Tony into showing her details of the Iron Man armour. Which. His imagination might be getting away from him.
He’s cooked about half of them when she wanders into the kitchen the next morning, and once again raises that eyebrow when he slides a plate in front of her. “Sorry,” he says. “I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Steve.”
She looks incredulous, but shakes his hand when he offers it, “Emma,” she says, and he thinks he sees her trying not to laugh. Tony, when he wanders upstairs, seems to shake himself awake as he stares at the two of them talking in horrified fascination, before dragging Emma almost bodily from the room.
“Tony!” he calls after them. His eyebrows are drawn together. “That’s no way to treat a lady!”
As the elevator door slams shut, he’s pretty sure Tony collapses against her in laughter.
Half an hour later, the banging starts.
*
There’s banging drifting up from the workshop the next day.
And the day after that.
*
Steve has never considered himself to be easily distracted. The intermittent banging, however, is driving him to the end of his rope. Even when he’s not at the mansion. Someone drops something at SHIELD HQ and it’s his first thought. He’d like to think that it’s the noise itself, but it’s not. It’s the – the images. He tries not to wonder what on earth they’re doing to make that sort of racket. Steve hasn’t had a chance to get a lot of experience, and he just – he’s read the papers, and he knows Tony’s background. And Emma seems like the sort of dame who’s had her fair share of experience.
(They’re probably spectacular together.)
He feels like a voyeur.
It’s a relief of sorts when Pepper shows up. Her heels are much more silent on the hardwood floor than Emma’s manage to be on carpet, so he’s starting to think it’s a choice on her part.
(It was bad when Tony and Pepper broke up. Pepper went away for a while, and they’d thought Tony had done the same until Bruce mentioned something about his having being in the basement for the last week. Then there was the intervention. Apparently Thor had wanted to perform the Midgardian ritual since he’d seen Intervention on television. It had taken them a while to explain to him that Tony wasn’t actually having Pepper withdrawal, and that Thor could take off the fake Jeff VanVonderen moustache any time.
“I CANNOT, FRIENDS!” Thor had boomed. “I HAVE GLUED IT TO MY FACE FOR MAXIMUM AUTHENTICITY.”
Tony ended up crying with what was probably laughter, but at least it was a step forward. Tony sometimes still looks at Pepper with something like reverence, like he can’t believe she’s still his friend.)
“He’s in the basement?” Pepper asks. She’s got a sheaf of documents under her arm and a frazzled look on her face. Steve’s pretty certain he’s never thought about what Tony’s scarred hands would look like against her pale skin.
Pretty sure.
“Basement?” Pepper repeats as Steve blinks guiltily. Something down there crashes and she sighs. “Of course.” She pulls out her tablet and starts flipping rapidly through documents.
Steve reaches out instinctively to grab her arm as she heads for the hall. “You, um. Might want to wait. He’s got company.” He can feel his face colour as he releases her arm. He doesn’t know what the rules are for this. If Pepper is allowed to know about Tony’s sudden attachment to a particular stripper. If she wants to know. Pepper seems to have taken the break-up on a slightly more even keel than Tony, but Steve usually think that’s because Pepper as a whole is on a much more even keel than Tony.
Pepper looks up. “Is Emma in?”
“Yes?” Steve offers, wincing as something bangs loudly.
“Oh, good,” Pepper replies. “I wanted to see her, too.”
“Oh,” Steve says. Pepper is usually the one ushering out people covered with glitter, with her back straight and lips ever so slightly compressed, so that’s not exactly what he was expecting. But Fury implied that Emma and Tony went back, so it’s entirely possible that Pepper and Emma are already – familiar.
Pepper tucks her tablet and the folders against her navy-clad hip. “Tony was just the tiiiniest bit stuck until she agreed to clear her schedule and work out here for a bit. Not that he’d admit it.” Something crashes loudly again, and she sighs in exasperation. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and see what they’re doing.”
And just like that, she’s heading for the basement. Steve stays where he is, standing stock still, because that’s not what he was expecting at all. The banging stops for a few minutes, then starts up again at what he’s pretty sure is higher volume. He sits down carefully and puts his head in his hands.
Just when he thinks he’s got this century figured out.
*
The thing is, Steve’s trying not to think about why this bothers him so much. He’s trying not to think about it because he may be old-fashioned, but he’s not stupid, and he gets it. It takes more than a few months to erase a lifetime of social conditioning, no matter how much you might be consciously aware of it. He knows he thinks about Tony more than he probably should; about the crinkles at the corners of his eyes and the curve of his shoulder muscles arcing into a neck that always looks corded with tension, about the shadow of stubble that ghosts his jaw when he’s been up all night.
It has less to do with Tony and more to do with the fact that Tony is the first guy he’s actually let himself think of this way. (It being thinking about Tony. Or thinking about thinking about Tony. Steve thinks, anyways.) And Steve feels almost like he’s taking advantage of him. That he’s making assumptions because of Tony’s reputation, and the fact that Tony apparently sometimes like men that way. With the fact that if you want to get technical, Steve’s the team lead and Tony is a subordinate in their quasi-military set up, though he’s pretty sure Tony would laugh himself sick over the idea. (He doesn’t think Pepper would, though, which gives him pause.)
It’s not about Emma at all.
*
Steve overcompensates. Tony asks him if he wants to grab a burger one day, coffee the next, pizza, and Steve makes sure to invite Emma. There’s a flicker in Tony’s eyes when Steve does that, and his grin becomes forced, like he knows what Steve’s overcompensating for – or he thinks Steve is judging, and Steve’s not sure which would be worse; Steve wants to say something but he has no idea what that would be. Instead, he pulls out Emma’s chair for her and stares down at his hands and tries not to feel small.
*
It turns out that the fact that Steve’s trying not to think about it means that he’s really not thinking about it. At all. He’s not thinking about things in the most spectacular of manners, as becomes abundantly clear to him while they’re fighting bear-sized mechanical kittens on the lower East Side.
The kittens aren’t the most destructive things they’ve faced, not by a long shot, but they are having a bit of a hard time taking them out. Hawkeye’s arrows have a tendency to get vaporized by the green laser beams the kittens shoot from their eyes before they hit their targets, and even with all Natasha’s ninja-like skills, she appears to be having a hard time finding the important robot-y parts under the fur.
Apparently, the Hulk is allergic to cats.
Thor keeps trying to pet them in the hopes of finding one that would make an appropriate steed. He only smashes them with the hammer after they respond to his advances with an attempt to eat him. Steve is mainly afraid that one will actually befriend him and Thor will try to bring it back to the mansion, where Tony will destroy it in a way that makes Thor make that sad face that Steve tells himself he is in no way affected by.
Speaking of. “Iron Man, what’s your ETA?” he yells into the comm, vaulting over a park bench. He tucks into a forward roll as he comes down, heels hot from narrowly-avoided laser beam blasts.
“Less than five minutes,” Tony’s voice comes. He chuckles, low. “Don’t tell me Captain America needs to be rescued from a bunch of kitty cats?”
“Just get here,” Steve grits out, whipping his shield around to catch a paw swipe that knocks him back into a tree.
“Hulk no wike fwuffy kitties!” Hulk yells, eyes red and swollen as he smashes – someone’s car.
Steve winces.
“Control module is in the back of the neck!” Natasha yells, holding something pulsing red and silver over her head as the cat she’s crouched atop of crashes to the ground with a hole in its neck.
“Got it!” Steve yells, adds: “got that everyone?” into his communicator.
“Incoming!” Tony’s voice sounds in his ear and he looks up to see Iron Man arcing in towards them. Steve has a moment to notice that the suit appears to be carrying something. Something humanoid and made of glass. Steve dodges under another paw swipe as Iron Man releases what he’s carrying. It resolves itself into a human shape as it falls, arms outstretched to control the descent. Steve rolls backwards out of the robot’s reach and has just enough time to wonder why Iron Man is carrying someone (who isn’t him) before the figure crashes down on top of the robot kitten at near-terminal velocity, sending fur and giant kitten limbs flying everywhere and shaking the ground. It’s a female figure that climbs out of the impact crater and robot remains, scowling at the fluff and motor oil that coats her glittering surface.
“You all right, ma’am?” he asks, just to be sure, because, well. Impact crater.
“Yes, yes, fine,” she says dismissively, and whips the robot kitten sneaking up on her halfway down the block.
She looks familiar, but Steve’s pretty busy dodging another one of the cats. It doesn’t take too much longer after that; they know what to go for to take out the control centre so he starts taking them out with a hurled shield while Black Widow and the new woman rip them out. Iron Man picks them off from above, Thor has stopped trying to make them his friends and is just hitting them with his hammer in a way that is rather reminiscent of little bunny Foo Foo, and Hawkeye has taken to pointing the Hulk at things that are actually robots and then letting him go.
There’s a pretty good crowd gathered by the time they’re done. Apparently, mechanical kittens are not above the threat level that sends civilians actually scurrying for cover, even if the kitten are bear-sized and shoot lasers. The air is full of cat fur and fluff, and the Hulk is sitting sadly on the corner across from the park, sniffling and sneezing gigantic sneezes that lift him right off the ground.
The glass woman stands at the edge of the grass, surveying everything with crossed arms. Steve walks over to her, glittering white and semi-transparent, flashbulb from the reporters flickering strangely through her body. Not glass, his hindbrain supplies. Diamond. Organic diamond. Which means –
“Good thing they look like robots when you smash them open,” Iron Man says as he lands besides Steve. Steve’s stomach is turning slow lazy circles. “Instead of organic, bloody fluffy balls of death.”
“Can you imagine the publicity, if Fluffy were spread gorily about the block?” Emma replies. “I doubt it would do any good for either of our company’s stocks.”
*
Emma.
Emma Frost.
Co-headmaster of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. CEO of Frost International.
Not actually a stripper.
Steve stands there, staring at a metal spine with wires sparking sullenly against the sidewalk. Low level SHIELD agents are starting to move into the area, collecting debris. The rest of the Avengers gather in around Steve, Tony, and Emma. Bruce is back but his face is still swollen, eyes red, and sneezing miserably. No one else seems surprised to see Emma there, or to see her flicker back into flesh and blood.
“Let’s all agree not to do that ever again,” Clint says.
The press is even more excited than normal.
“How do you justify this blatant cruelty towards robo-animals? Are you at all concerned about PETA’s response?”
“Captain America! Who was the mysterious woman you were seen speaking with in a grocery store at 2:14 AM last Thursday?”
“Are the X-Men and the Avengers forming some sort of combined super team?”
“How do you justify working with any part of the mutant menace?”
“Why aren’t there any mutants on the roster of the Avengers? What sort of a message does that send to young mutants?”
“Well, this has been great,” Tony says, finally. “But, busy people, lots to do. Companies to run, genius inventions to create, small countries to save, that sort of thing. Wanna ride?” he asks, turning to the group.
Steve’s about to reply that yes, he’d love a lift back to the mansion when he realizes Tony’s talking to Emma. He closes his mouth again as she nods, and steps onto one of Tony’s boots as he tips his visor back closed. She shifts back into her diamond form as they blast off, and Steve tells himself that it is ridiculous to be jealous that Tony is carrying someone who is not him.
*
It’s probably the ex-super villain thing that they thought he was freaking out over, Steve realizes in the car on the way back to the mansion. That’s what Fury thought Steve was warning him about. Why Tony thought Steve was asking about Emma’s security clearance. When she was a supervillain she designed her own version of Cerebro, and created a gun capable of switching people’s consciousness between bodies, so she’s actually probably exactly the person Tony would want to help him to work on neurological interfaces for the suit. So she was actually helping with the suit, because Tony’s an engineer, and physics and mechanics only go so far. It’s a good thing that no one knows what he was thinking when –
Except, Emma’s a telepath.
Steve lets his head bang forward against the dashboard.
“What is the problem, my friend?” Thor asks from the back seat. He leans forward. “Are you much saddened by the loss of our potential kitten steeds?”
“No, Thor,” Steve says, and shakes his head as much as he can while still resting it against the dash. Emma Frost.
"Yes!" Thor proclaims. It appears Steve might have said that out loud. Thor beams as Steve as he continues. "Tony’s woman of ice was indeed of great help! And of great use as an aerial bombast!"
Coulson, driving, says, “Pay up.” Steve turns his head to see Coulson snapping his fingers over his shoulder at Natasha in the back.
“Fine,” she says, and pulls a few bills from – somewhere, she pulls them from somewhere, and Steve still hasn’t figured out how she gets herself into her uniform, let alone anything else in there with her. “I can’t believe you actually won with ’during a fight with dinosaurs or robot animals.’” She frowns at Steve as she hands them to Coulson. "You couldn’t have held off on the realization until a society function?"
Thor frowns. "Do you think that she would deign to allow me to hurl her at our enemies, should an opportune occasion arise?"
Steve covers his face with his hands and doesn’t look up for the rest of the ride.
Part 2
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Date: 2012-03-15 02:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-15 03:23 am (UTC)