Title: Classic-verse 1.6 - To the Ends of the Earth 4/4
Authors: seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Hank/Jan. Eventually Steve/Tony.
Warnings: This fic is not quite so fluffy as the previous ones. No slash yet, although hints are starting to show through.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Author's Note: Much delayed, and un-beta'd due to real life insanity. Still this will be going up on our regular schedule of Wednesdays and Saturdays come hell or high water.
Summary: Steve finally comes face to face with Baron Zemo. Also, there are ants.

Classic-verse 1.6 - To the Ends of Earth



His chest hurt, the sharp knifing pain that meant the shards of shrapnel had been moving again. It was a distant pain now, though, which meant that the chest device was working again and this particular round of near heart failure was on its way to becoming a memory.

Sound was patchy and hollow, fading in and out.

"I think he's waking up." A woman's voice. Pepper? Pepper didn't know; only Happy knew. Had he passed out in the office again?

"See, I told you I didn't electrocute him."

Tony kept his eyes closed, feeling the familiar dizzy weakness that meant he had run out of power again. The claustrophobic feeling of his heart struggling to beat properly was gone, though. He'd be fine as soon as he got enough oxygen back into his blood.

He drew in a deep breath, willing himself not to be sick. He was lying on a smooth concrete floor -- he could feel the cool hardness of it under his left hand.

Tony rolled his head sideways, gently in case moving was going to make something else hurt, and rested the side of his face against the concrete. The chill that seeped into his skin gave him something to focus on, helped him push back the dizziness.

"Iron Man, are you well?"

That was Thor's voice, booming over him. Thor had the kind of voice made to carry through blizzards and across ancient battlefields, and whispering was not something he did well.

Thor. So, he hadn't passed out in the office then.

Then the meaning of the cool concrete against his bare cheek finally penetrated.

Tony opened his eyes to find himself the focus of a semicircle of his fellow Avengers, all of them staring at him intently. Steve was the closest, bent over Tony so that he found himself looking straight up into concerned blue eyes.

Steve was frowning, his blond eyebrows peeking through the edge of the mask's eyeholes. He looked upset, something almost like pain on his face. Tony hoped Zemo hadn't gotten away in the confusion.

"So," he said, trying to sound as casual as one could sound while lying on the floor with a power cord plugged into one's chest, "my secret identity's been completely blown to hell, hasn't it?"

"Why didn't you tell us you were compromised?" Steve demanded, and Tony closed his eyes again at the anger in his voice. Steve had probably never lied to anyone in his life, and Tony had been lying to him, both as Tony Stark and as Iron Man, ever since they'd met.

He'd been lying to everyone since the day he first put on the armor, but most people didn't know either Iron Man or Tony Stark well enough for it to matter. The Avengers were different, though. Like Happy, like Pepper, they had deserved to know the truth, especially Steve, whom he had become friends with both as Iron Man and as Tony. And like with Pepper, he hadn't told them.

"I should have had an hour's worth of power left," he said, instead of the apology he really ought to have offered. "The damage to the armor's power system must have accelerated the drain on my chest device."

The dizziness was fading now, leaving behind a dull headache in its place. Tony rolled onto his side stared to push himself up onto one elbow.

Thor placed one massive hand on his shoulder and pushed him gently but firmly back down. "Your heart may be damaged. You should lie down and rest."

May be damaged? Tony let out a sort of half-laughing noise before he could stop himself. "It's fine as long as this keeps working," he said, tapping the chest device lightly with one finger. "I'm only in trouble if the charge runs dry."

The others were still staring at him, or, more precisely, at his chest. He didn't want to have to tell the whole sorry story - being blown up by your own landmine and getting kidnapped by terrorists, and only escaping because another, better man died in your place wasn't the stuff of heroism by any definition. Steve had respected him, or had respected Iron Man at least, and a small, selfish part of Tony didn't want that respect to end.

"What, um, what is it?" Steve asked, looking away and coloring faintly, as embarrassed that he'd asked.

"A very fancy electromagnet," Tony said flatly. He glanced around, taking in the other Avengers hovering around him. "Where's Zemo?" he asked. "He didn't get away, did he?" After all they had gone through to capture him...

"He's tied up," Jan said, "remember?" She nodded over her shoulder, and Tony , following her gaze, saw Heinrich Zemo tied securely to a chair on the opposite side of the room. The chair was facing away from them, but,

"Did he see me?" That would be all he needed. He'd managed to keep Iron Man's identity hidden for over a year, but during that time he'd made enough superhuman enemies that the idea of someone knowing whose face was under Old Shellhead's helmet was not something he wanted to contemplate.

Hammer had nearly destroyed Tony Stark and Iron Man both, and that was without knowing that they were one and the same.

Hank frowned, shaking his head slightly. "I don't think so. But I, ah, said your name when I saw you with the helmet off. Sorry. If it helps, it was just your first name."

Tony relaxed slightly. He might have gotten lucky just this once; Zemo had more important things to think about right now that Iron Man's identity, like what was going to happen at his war crimes trial.

"So did we figure out what we're going to do with him now that we've got him?" He paused, then added, "Not to mention how we're getting out of here."

Steve frowned, and gave Tony a long, evaluating look. "You contacted SHIELD with Zemo's communications equipment. Nick's sending a team to extract us and taking Zemo into custody."

Which would explain why he'd been so sure Zemo was going to face a trial. "Oh," Tony said. "That was a good idea."

Steve's frown deepened, eyebrows drawing together and jaw tightening. "Thor's right; you should rest some more," he said. It was not a suggestion. "Thor, can you keep an eye on our prisoner? I wouldn't put it past him to figure out some way to get himself untied; Zemo was always resourceful."

Thor nodded solemnly, and stood, bracing his hammer against the floor and levering himself up with it. He was, Tony noted looking up at him, incredibly tall from this perspective. "I shall guard him closely. He may have escaped justice once before, but he shall not do so this time." He nodded at the room's still-open door. "Someone should stand guard over the doors at the end of the hall, lest Zemo's men find a way around the fortifications, as we did."

"I'll go." Jan climbed to her feet, then shrank down and took to the air. "I can bring a warning more quickly than any of the rest of you."

"I'll go too." Hank was already standing. He, too, seemed to loom over Tony, not just because Tony was flat on his back, but because he was still at least a foot taller than his normal height, possibly more.

And then they were gone, and Tony was alone with Steve. Well, unless you counted the Nazi tied up in the corner, and the large Asgardian guarding him. Thor and Zemo were out of earshot, however, and that was almost like being alone.

Tony sat up, concealing a wince as something in his chest twinged. It was probably just a bruise from being hit by flying debris, nothing to worry about. He let himself sag forward, resting his head in his hands, fingers tangling in his hair, which was still sweaty and tangled from his helmet. Where was his helmet, anyway?

He glanced around, looking for it, but before he could voice the question, Steve was holding it out to him.

"I don't think Zemo's seen you yet, but that's no reason to take chances." He stared at Tony as he spoke, expression serious. It felt as if he were looking straight through Tony, through the armor and the expensive haircut and all of the confidence and composure he'd learned to project over the past year to the fucked-up wreck Tony was underneath them. If he looked long and hard enough, Tony knew, he'd figure out that Tony wasn't really a hero at all; just a rich guy with some fancy toys who would never be able to fix even half the damage his company and his weapons had done before he'd gotten his explosives-assisted wake-up call. A hero would have found a way to save Yinsen, would have never allowed himself to be manipulated into killing Sergio, wouldn't need a nightcap every evening just to be able to sleep.

"And speaking of taking chances," Steve began.

Tony took his helmet from Steve's hands without meeting his eyes, not putting it on, just holding it. Even just having it in his hands made him feel better.

"I'm not going to point out that could have died, because I'm sure you know that." Steve's voice was perfectly calm, even soft, probably in deference to the fact that Zemo was less than twenty feet away. Tony could hear the contained anger in it anyway. "You should have told the rest of the team that you were injured." He was still staring down at Tony with the piercing blue gaze, arms folded across his chest and jaw set, silently evaluating him and finding him wanting. Tony found himself looking away, down at the dully reflective gold surface of his helmet, unable to meet Steve's eyes.

"The rest of us need to know what kind of condition you're in," Steve went on. "When you're hurt, I need to know about it so I can plan around it."

"The armor can compensate for that kind of thing most of the time." His heart might be damaged, but as long as he had the chest device and the armor, none of it mattered. He could have been paralyzed or even have lost limbs in Afghanistan, and in the armor, still been stronger and tougher than a normal human. Physical strength wasn't necessary; the circuitry and power-assisted hydraulics did all the heavy lifting.

"Except when it's broken," Steve said dryly. He sighed, and seemed to deflate slightly. "Tell me this is first time this has happened. You can't, can you?"

"The first time the armor's been damaged this way, or the first time I've run out of power?" Tony asked, trying to prolong the moment when he'd have to either lie or admit the answer was 'no, I can't.'

Steve shook his head. "Look, Iron Man, I..." He took a deep breath, as if stealing himself against something, and then he dropped to one knee beside Tony, so that their faces were closer to the same level.

Startled, Tony looked up again, and found himself staring directly into Steve's eyes once again. They were very blue, framed by lashes so blond they were almost transparent. Steve had been so focused and business-like through-out most of this fiasco that Tony had been reminded once more of something that he'd almost forgotten over the past few weeks -- Steve Rogers was a soldier, created as a symbol and trained to be a weapon. Tony had experience with war zones, some of it from a much closer perspective than he would have preferred, but Steve had spent over four years on the front lines of World War II. He might be the same age as the rest of them, but he had a hell of a lot more experience.

Right now, though, even with the mask on and the edges of the shield peeking up over his shoulders, he looked like the same ordinary, earnest, slightly awkward guy Tony drank coffee with in the mornings and talked to about books and old radio shows. Like someone attainable, not an untouchable living legend, but someone he could be friends with.

"Tony," Steve said, his voice low, rough, almost hoarse, "you scared the hell out of all of us. Please don't do it again."

Message received and understood. "You have my word," he said. "I won't let my health problems interfere with the team again." A worried Steve Rogers was almost worse than an angry Captain America; Tony didn't want or need pity, didn't need to be treated like an invalid, and Steve had enough worries of his own without Tony adding to them.

"Good," Steve said.

Tony offered Steve a smile, and then settled his helmet back over his head. The helmet was designed to seal seamlessly with the neck of the armor, making it completely airtight. Before he'd passed out, it had been in perfect working order. Now, it barely fit into place, the edges completely refusing to meet in several places.

Tony felt carefully around the seam, finding three places where parts of the helmet's edges were bent and one point where the metal was actually torn. "What did you do to my helmet?" he demanded. He knew it made him sound like an ungrateful bastard, since the Avengers almost certainly saved his life, but they had broken his helmet. That shouldn't even have been possible, given the alloy the helmet was made of and the level of structural strength Tony had built into it.

"We couldn't get it off." Steve shrugged, rubbing at the back of his neck with one hand and looking almost embarrassed. "Thor had to rip it off you."

"You're not supposed to be able to take it off." Tony had specifically designed the armor that way, to make sure that he was the only one who could remove the helmet, and that it wouldn't get torn off during a fight.

If Thor had been able to pull it off by main force, than it clearly needed a redesign.

"How far away is the SHIELD team?" Tony asked, giving up on any hope of getting helmet to seal properly and reaching for his discarded gauntlet.

"They should be about seven hours out by now." Steve reached down and took Tony by the wrist, pulling him to his feet. Considering that the armor added thirty-two point one pounds to Tony's weight, it was impressive how easily Steve was able to haul him upright.

Then again, Steve had at least forty pounds of muscle on Tony, so maybe it wasn't that impressive. Beyond the fact that that much sculpted muscle was the kind of thing you normally only saw on statues of Greek athletes. Of course, the Greeks being the brilliant and advanced civilization that they were, those statues generally wore considerably less clothing than Steve.

Not that Steve's costume left much to the imagination, either, especially when Tony was sitting and he was standing with his crotch pretty much at eye level. Looking and appreciating was unavoidable.

Tony braced himself against the momentary dizziness of suddenly being upright, waving away Steve's concerned frown. "We'll have to keep an eye on Zemo the whole time. We can set up teams to rotate between him and the door."

"I can bring the security system back online." Tony nodded at the nearest of the consoles. "Then we'll have the outside cameras, too."

"Good," Jan's voice came from behind him. "I was just about to ask you about that."

Tony turned to see Jan hovering in the air a few feet behind himself and Steve, wings beating furiously. Now that the red glare of the warning lights were gone, her red and black costume looked garishly bright in the bunker's fluorescent lighting.

"Any problems at the door?" Steve asked, his body going tense. He was reached back for his shield when Jan forestalled him.

"No, nothing yet. Hank just remembered that we've got a state of the art electronic security and surveillance set-up at our disposal if Tony can undo what he did to it." She turned back to Tony. "It's good to see you on your feet."

"Maybe we can avoid using my name in front of our prisoner?" Tony suggested. Being addressed by name while he was wearing the armor made him feel oddly exposed, but he couldn't exactly ask them all to pretend they still didn't know who he was, particularly given how they'd found out.

"If it helps," she offered, "Hank and I already knew."

"You knew?" Tony blurted out. He thought back quickly over the last few months, trying to remember every interaction between Iron Man and the rest of the Avengers, anything that might have given him away.

Jan raised her eyebrows. "Remember the Thanksgiving party six years ago where you taught Norman Osborn's kid and his weird little friend how to turn a microwave oven into a bomb?"

"Jarvis wanted a new microwave anyway." Tony grinned at the memory; that had been one of the more entertaining holiday parties his parents had hosted. For all that he'd initially cringed at getting stuck at the "kids table," when he was already a college student, Harry, Felicia, and the others had turned out to be better company than most of the adult businessmen he was usually stuck sitting with at dinner parties these days. Also, the microwave had actually left a small crater in the Mansion's back yard.

While Jarvis had in fact wanted a new microwave, he'd been significantly less understanding about that.

"Or back when we were twelve and you hacked into the Hardy's security system and rigged it to go off every time a new guest arrived at their house?"

"Come on, that one was legitimately brilliant." They had had to call the alarm company and bring in two different computer experts in order to undo what Tony had done. He'd been particularly proud of himself over that. His father had figured out it was him, of course.

That was one of the things that had finally prompted Tony to decide that not all parental attention was good attention. Being ignored would have been better than being sent back to boarding school a week early.

Steve lips twitched. "It sounds like there's all kinds of important things about you I don't know. I pity your parents."

"And the fact that I was a horrible kid convinced you that I was Iron Man how?" Tony asked Jan, ignoring Steve's amused little smile.

Jan grinned. "Because I knew there was absolutely no way you'd be able to build something like the armor and not have to try it out yourself. That race car accident you were in last year was all over the news for a week."

"And you told Hank?"

"Hank figured it out for himself the first time Iron Man called him 'Highpockets.'" She smirked at him, and bobbed slightly in the air. "Tip for the future. If you want to keep people in the dark, don't use the same stupid nicknames for them in and out of costume."

This from the woman who called Hank "Blue Eyes." "I'll keep that in mind," Tony said.

"When I was teaching you unarmed combat," Steve said conversationally, "you tried to use the repulsor gauntlets you weren't wearing on me."

And it looked like there were some things Tony didn't know about Steve, either, because it had never occurred to him that Steve was capable of that kind of cheerful bastard smirk.

He was going to have to be watch himself around Steve now. He had lost the safe barrier of being somebody else, now that there was no longer the distance imposed by a secret identity between them. Steve was the closest thing to a real friend he'd made since he'd met Happy and Rhodey, maybe even closer -- he'd found himself telling Steve things he wouldn't have admitted to Rhodey even under the influence of considerable amounts of alcohol -- but a friend was all Tony could afford to think of him as. Too much eyeing Steve's muscles and ass and thinking about how sexy that smirk looked on him could only lead to trouble.


***


It had been sixty years since he'd last been in one, the insides of military transport planes hadn't changed as much as Steve had expected. Steve often found himself wishing that certain things were still the way they'd been in 1945, but metal and canvass fold-down seats weren't one of them. Neither was sitting in an un-pressurized cargo bay listening to engine noise. For one thing, the plane didn't have any heat, and while it might be over ninety degrees in the jungle far below, it was significantly colder at 8,000 feet.

Hank and Jan were sitting up front, close to the SHIELD pilots. Jan's head was resting on
Hank's shoulder, and he had an arm around her. Hank had started to make some comment about the cold, and Jan had smiled and rolled her eyes before snuggling up to him. The two of them were talking quietly, but Steve couldn't hear them over the drone of the engine.

Thor was sitting on the floor of the plane, across from Steve. He was too tall to fit comfortably in the seats; Steve sympathized, since his own seat was very much not designed for someone over six feet. Thor looked tired, something Steve had never seen before -- he actually had his eyes closed, not actually asleep, but dozing, his head tilted back against the wall. There were a scattering of small burns across his face and arms from the anti-tank missile, but Steve would bet it was the Enchantress's frog that had left him looking so worn out.

There was a little satisfied smile on his face, though. He obviously counted the mission as a complete success.

Steve, looking around the plane at his assembled team, wasn't so sure.

Tony was completely limp in the seat beside him, in a way that suggested either unconsciousness or deep sleep. In the armor, with the helmet on, Steve couldn't even see him breathing. It was a detail he'd never noticed before, but now, with Tony so still and silent, he was finding it particularly disturbing.

Tony had stayed on his feet until the SHIELD team had gotten there, but as soon as they were airborne, he'd sacked out in one of the seats, looking like a robot that had had its power turned off. Which, come to think of it, was a more apt comparison than Steve liked.

He had defeated Zemo, but it had nearly cost him his team.

It had been stupid to come down here, he knew. They had had no plan, no intelligence on their target's defenses, and no real idea what they were going to do if they actually won. Nick had bailed them out in more ways than one. They all could have ended up in very serious trouble over this if he hadn't come through with his SHIELD team and Vespugian rebels.

Destroying Zemo had been justice, but it had also been vengeance, and it had been incredibly irresponsible of Steve to let the Avengers get involved in it without any preparation. He had taken off on the spur of the moment, letting his personal grievances against Zemo overwhelm his common sense. It wasn't a mistake he would make a second time.

Next time a situation like this arose, if one ever did, Steve would have a plan. He would use the resources available to him -- Tony & Hank's knowledge, Jan's common sense, Thor's battle experience, even Nick's SHIELD contacts if necessary -- to make sure they had the best chances for victory he could buy them.

He wasn't fighting a war any longer, but that was no excuse to get lazy. What they did wasn't a game, and shouldn't be treated as such. It was too important for that, and the stakes were too high.

Still, despite all that, he couldn't help but feel a vast relief that Zemo was gone.

Now he only had to worry about his past haunting him figuratively, rather than literally. Nightmares, Steve could handle. Vespugian assassins coming after his team were much harder to shrug off.

He wished Tony wasn't wearing the helmet, that he could see his face. He needed the sleep, Steve knew, but it would have been easier to keep an eye on him if Steve could actually see him.

At least Jan and Hank were still in one piece.

Once they got back to New York, Steve decided, he was going to call up that doctor friend of Thor's and get him to come take a look at Tony. Maybe at Thor, too, though there probably wasn't much a human doctor could do for an Asgardian god.

"You should be proud, my friend," Thor said softly, his eyes still closed. "You have proven to be a wise leader in battle. And your enemy has been soundly vanquished."

"Trust me," Steve said, and he found himself smiling as he said it, "I'll sleep better knowing he's taken care of. I should thank you, and the others. I would never have been able to pull this off on my own."

"You need not thank us." Thor opened his eyes, frowning slightly now. "No debts are owed between friends."

"Well, thanks all the same," Steve said. He could feel his face heating, and was glad the mask hid it. "If you'd let me take off on my own..." He shook his head. "I'm lucky to be an Avenger. I still owe you guys for letting me join your team in the first place." It had been the best thing that could have happened to him, he knew that. He couldn't even imagine what it would have been like to try and adjust to this new time on his own, if he'd had to try and find a place for himself in normal, civilian life.

Zemo had destroyed Steve's old life, but he had built new one for himself now, with the Avengers. With Zemo dealt with and Bucky's death avenged, maybe it was time to start putting the past behind him, to let himself move forward.

He was living in the future now, after all. It was time he started to plan for one.


* * *

Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four