Everything Left Unsaid

miss_porcupine

“You out here by yourself for a reason?” Tony asked, joining Steve at the railing of the balcony facing south.

“Just thinking,” Steve answered. He’d come outside for a moment of quiet and fresh air and then got distracted by the stars and the lights of the city. And his memories.

He’d not allowed himself to dwell too much on the fact that he was gearing up to go after Johann Schmidt again, to destroy HYDRA again, to accomplish all of the tasks he’d rued as unfinished as he’d steered that plane into the ice so long ago. Because if he started to look at it like that, as anything other than just another mission for SHIELD here in the twenty-first century, then he’d drown in the wanting to be back there, back then, where he was supposed to be instead of where he was, which was surrounded by people who were placing their lives in trust of his leadership.

But tonight, he’d given himself a moment to accept that this was more than just another mission. He still missed the people he’d left behind with an ache that stole his breath away, even if Bucky had left him first, even if Peggy were still here with him. Even if he had people who cared about him now and whom he cared for in turn.

“You know, you’re about as predictable as a sunrise,” Tony sighed with a smile, letting himself fall over to the right so that he jostled Steve’s left shoulder. “Come back inside. I’ve got something.”

Steve looked over because he recognized that tone. “What did you do, Tony?”

miss_porcupine

“You’re in a mood,” Tapper said finally looking over.

Steve had tucked the envelope with Hopper’s letter into his tablet case and it faced him as he opened it now. He plucked it off the screen and handed it to Tapper. “Can you see that this gets where it’s supposed to go?”

“What’s this?” Tapper asked, although he could see that it said “to the family of Agent Alvin Hopper” on the envelope.

“The price of a salute,” Steve replied simply, turning on his tablet.

The prep material for the briefing was an outline of what would be discussed and then a one-page biography of a man named George Tarleton, who was apparently the head of AIM – the real head, not the floppy-haired figurehead CEO with the inspiring tale of immigrant success who appeared on their website and government documents. And one look at his tale made Steve sit up out of his slouch because there were some very familiar names on his job history: Stark Industries and Trident Corporation.

“Hunh,” he murmured. “This might end up being a useful afternoon after all.”

Tapper smiled. “See, that’s better. Groundless optimism that Kolnbach, given the football and thirty yards of open field, won’t trip over his own shoelaces en route to the end zone. Much more your speed.”

miss_porcupine

By the time Steve got back to Manhattan, he’d found out that the search for the dead was nearing completion (the search for the missing was nowhere near done) and efforts were being shifted toward recovery. The commander of the Task Force told Steve that while he was welcome to help document power outages caused by the EMPs and HYDRA, what would really be helpful would be an appearance at the evacuation centers.

“We saw this after the Towers and after the Chitauri,” Colonel Waldman explained, “there are a lot of scared people, some of them looking for someone who didn’t come home last night and some of them wondering if they still have a home to return to and we just don’t have the resources to give everyone an answer right away and some of them, we can’t answer at all. It can get ugly and it’s not usually anyone’s fault that it does.”

Waldman wasn’t asking Steve to be a USO girl and gladhand with pep and vim; he was asking him to be a bullet magnet when every shot fired went straight to someone’s heart and the shield wouldn’t even slow them down.

“Of course,” Steve agreed, ignoring the tiny voice (that still sounded like Bucky) telling him that this was going to hurt for far longer than the gouge in his back.

miss_porcupine

"It's a raid, Tony, not a date," Steve sighed as he put his beer glass down. Stark Industries' in-house microbrewery was starting to produce some really good bitters.

Tony, mouth full of burger, gave him a dirty look as he chewed and swallowed. "Then quit talking about what I should wear and whether I should put out."

"You're the wrong kind of saucy for me," Steve said, gesturing that Tony should wipe the ketchupy trail of grease rapidly working its way to his chin. "Also, I can't say that Elizabeth, New Jersey is my idea of how to show a girl a good time."

"You took your girl to a war zone," Tony pointed out as he replaced his napkin in his lap. "You have no idea what constitutes a good date spot."

"She took me to a war zone," Steve corrected, picking up one of his fries. "And I have great ideas for date spots. But instead, I'm asking if you want to come to Jersey."

miss_porcupine

Clint grunted something that might be agreement or could simply be body soreness. “Do you want me to get you anything? More chocolate milk?”

“It does a body good,” Steve replied mildly, which made Clint cackle gleefully. Bruce and Tony had shown him the youtube clips earlier. “Actually, you could do me a favor and go over to Bruce and Tony’s lair and tell them that I said no and don’t.”

Clint tilted his head warily. “What are you telling them not to do?”

Steve shrugged. “I have no idea, but they’ve been left unattended for…” he trailed off to look at his watch, “five hours. I’m sure they’re up to something that they know they’re not supposed to be.”

Clint’s expression turned speculative. “It could be fun.”

“It could involve putting your mind inside a monkey body,” Steve countered. “Can you dance to an organ?”

He mimed picking a fez up off his head and holding it out for coins.

“I’m going to tell Natasha to beat you up,” Clint warned as he picked up his book and headed out.

“She’s going to do that anyway,” Steve called after him.

miss_porcupine

Steve shook his head and looked at his watch. "I have to get up before noon. I should go," he said and made to rise.

Tony reached out and grabbed his wrist. "I mean it, you know. You should give us a chance. A real chance, not a stuck-until-there's-a-time-machine chance. We're not so bad. Thor loves us."

"Thor loves Jane," Steve corrected. "He finds the rest of us somewhere between quaintly charming and outright bonkers."

Tony waved away the distinction. "Take the Maybach home with you tonight so that you can drive it down tomorrow."

"I've been drinking," Steve pointed out.

"You'll be stone cold sober by the time you get to the garage," Tony snorted. "Keys are... Jarvis knows where the keys are."

miss_porcupine

“What can I do?” he asked, because they could skip the opening remarks of that particular conversation and get down to the details.

He hadn’t seen Tony in weeks, hadn’t heard from him in almost as long; Tony had been too preoccupied by business to attend any of the informal Avengers social gatherings and there hadn’t been anything that Iron Man could do that some other SHIELD asset couldn’t. There’d been the occasional email or text from a meeting or a plane flight en route to a meeting, but even those had come at a rate much less frequent than Steve had grown accustomed to. Steve had noticed, of course, but he hadn’t been idle himself and if he’d considered why there hadn’t been random photos of Stark Industries Board of Directors’ nostrils or badly-translated text on soy sauce bottles, he’d just assumed that Tony was too busy to be bored. That Stark Industries was fighting for its future was news covered by the regular papers, too.

“It’s like we’re the wounded shark and everyone can smell the blood in the water,” Pepper began slowly, running an elegant fingertip around the rim of her goblet. “We were the most fearsome creature in the ocean, but we’re not anymore. Now we’re just another wounded animal and now everyone we’ve ever pissed on or pissed off - and by ‘we,’ I mean ‘we’ as the collective first person and not the royal ‘we’ that’s just a polite euphemism for ‘Tony’ - is watching us swim on, looking for an opening to strike out and get back whatever it is they think we took from them or that they feel they deserve. And Trident is swimming right alongside and I don’t know if they’re going to join the feeding frenzy once it starts or just swim right on by to become the new big shark.”