Fic: There is no 'I'... 7/11
Chapter 7
Captain America had a not unreasonable desire to make sure the Avengers team was battle ready. Due to each individual being formidable in their own right, they tended to work to their own strengths in combat, leading to more than one error. Case in point, Clint and Thor’s minor fuck up with the spiders meant that Tony was playing chicken with Cap’s shield on his back lawn instead of designing new armor in the garage.
Two teams, Tony and Clint versus Natasha and Thor with Cap running interference on both sides trying to shake everyone up a little. Bruce recording the session for later review had Tony acting up for the camera. While no-one was trying to cause hurt, Tony could kill Natasha with frightening ease after all; they were doing their damndest to bring the other side down. Unfortunately Thor took one too many concussion hits from Hawkeye and brought lightening down on the whole garden. Tony, being a show off, decided to fly a slalom course through the electrical forest rather than take cover like everyone else.
He got one sharp, devastating jolt. For two point four seconds JARVIS was offline and Iron Man was tumbling towards the mansion out of control. As soon as he had power Tony frantically tried to stabilize his momentum with boot and hand repulsors. It wasn’t working.
He was going to hit Bruce. Hard.
It happened between one breath and the next. One moment the HUD was there, red frames skittering alarmingly across his vision and then cool air rushed over Tony’s skin. His hair blew into his eyes for a split second before he crashed hard into the turned shoulder of his teammate.
“Ooof!” With a bone-crunching thump they went down, Bruce beneath Tony in an ungainly sprawl.
Sitting up gingerly, Tony heard the other Avengers running across the lawn towards them. “Hey Handsome.” He smiled down at the man he was straddling in nothing but tight boxer-briefs.
Bruce rolled his eyes and fingered a small cut on the bridge of his nose. “Her name’s Betty and she's way prettier than you. Get off me!”
Chuckling Tony had just began to comply when he was bodily lifted up to meet Captain America’s displeased expression.
“What on earth…” he began furiously, hands on Tony’s bare shoulders.
“Oh come!” Tony interrupted. “I instinctively dropped the armor before I hit him. No Iron Man torpedoes against innocent civilians. How is this not good?”
Steve took a deep breath. “What on earth happened to your armor?” He repeated with slightly less intensity.
“It dismantled into seventeen components…” Tony explained, trying not to treat Cap like an imbecile.
“Oh really Genius?” Clint snared Tony’s arm in an almost painful grip and tugged him around Cap. “Where is it then?” The view back along Iron Man’s course was clear of any red and gold plate shaped pieces.
Tony frowned.
“From where I was yelling and running it looked like the armor just melted into you.” Clint explained.
“Huh.” Looking closely at the contact node on his forearm, Tony saw it gleamed a brilliant shade of gold.
“The thing on your face is different.” Strong fingers caught the back of Tony’s head, turning his face to Steve. The anger was gone, now only worry caused the tight mouth and furrowed brow. “It’s red and gold, like the armor. Tony, what happened?”
“I don’t know.” Tony took the hit to his pride and answered truthfully. He would love to come up with a way of wiping out that worry but, surprisingly, he didn’t think he was capable of lying to Steve. The ICC was an experiment in progress, they’d thought it had run its course but obviously that wasn’t the case.
Bruce offered Tony his jacket and pointed towards the garage. “C’mon, let’s go run some tests.”
It was an indication of Tony’s state of mind that he followed Bruce without a word of protest, gaze on his arm, mind churning with possibilities.
****
“Sir, the MRI results indicate you have approximately 25 pounds of a metallic substance located within your skeleton. How the marrow remains and why you aren’t deceased is still a mystery.” While JARVIS rarely sounded worried, there was occasionally a faint trace of concern in the perfectly modulated voice. Like now.
“Weird.” Bruce offered with arms folded as he looked at the results of Tony’s scan.
“Says you.” Tony studied the node on back of his wrist. He pushed a fingernail onto the small golden disk, pressing harder when he felt no sensation. Smooth and flawless, the node was seamlessly blended into his skin, with no discernable edge or ridge. They had supposed that the nodes were connected to the armor, allowing it to bond completely with Tony’s skin, improving reaction time tenfold. “The man who quadruples his mass and changes the melanin content of his skin has no business calling anyone else weird.”
Smiling ruefully, Bruce tapped the screen to change the medical scan view of Tony’s form. “Your armor was broken down to component elements, compressed and then absorbed through the nodes into your skeleton. It must have responded to your desire to have it disappear before impact. Thanks by the way.”
“For the lack of broken Bruce or the lap dance?” Tony smirked, trying to push the node and the skin around it up onto his hand.
“Don’t do that,” Bruce tapped Tony’s fingers with a pen. “You’ll irritate the skin. The nodes have created small tubular conduits to your bones, if you damage them we’ll never get the armor out again. Catching you wasn’t that much fun by the way.” A gesture at the tiny plaster on Bruce’s nose.
“Hmmm. The question is can we get it back out?” Tony asked because the Mark VI was his finest creation yet and the plans for the Mark VII weren’t even finished. He’d been too busy helping save the New York from the Cult of the Bug.
“It would seem that you must simply will it to be so, Sir.” JARVIS chimed in thoughtfully. “The ICC system was designed to incorporate weapons into a human being. It would serve no purpose to lodge the armor in your skeleton without the means of retrieving it.”
Tony looked to the desk where JARVIS’ voice issued from the speakers. “That is an excellent point. I’m going to retool this garage as a summer home for you I promise.”
“Thank you Sir, I’ll be sure to have my eBay details altered accordingly.”
Shrugging off Bruce’s jacket, Tony stared for long seconds at the nodes on his hands. “I got nothing.”
“It’s your armor,” Bruce pointed out. “Maybe you need to be under threat to bring it out?”
“Okay,” Tony pulled the jacket back on. “Let’s see how many hands I get.”
Brow furrowed in confusion Bruce followed him back to the mansion.
*****
“Who wants to punch me?” Tony asked the team as they loitered around the dining room waiting for dinner.
He didn’t know if he should be flattered that Thor reached out to catch Clint’s shoulder or not. Steve’s eyes narrowed as he glanced at Tony’s still mostly naked form. “You can’t get it out?”
“Not just by wishing. Bruce thinks I need to be under threat,” a careless wave at the doctor behind him. “So someone gets to punch me.”
“No-one here will seriously hurt you,” Natasha spoke as she carefully lifted ridiculously healthy food onto her plate. “If you have to be genuinely under attack, it’ll need to be on the next mission.”
“I genuinely want to punch him.” Clint promised hopefully.
Tony ignored him. “Let me know when the next call comes in or we could just go have a picnic in the park again,” he grinned at Steve.
Baby blue eyes went from concerned to furious in under a second.
“Not funny Tony.” Steve snarled as he spun on his heel and walked out of the room.
Awkward was a massive understatement for the silence that followed his exit.
“Idiot.” Natasha said under her breath.
“I’m gonna get dressed.” Tony told them before making his way to his suite.
While hardly Tony’s worst verbal faux pas, it was likely the most self-destructive when attempting to forge a friendship with someone. He hadn’t even bothered to consider Steve’s feelings on his kidnapping, so lost in the ICC and the changes wrought on his body. Knowing the kind of man Captain America seemed to be, he would blame himself for Tony being taken that day. And Tony had just made a joke about it.
“Idiot.” He agreed, dressing in the beautiful Liana Lee suit Pepper had ordered for the awards ceremony he was supposed to attend that night. They’d started letting him out again now that Hammer was even deeper behind bars than before and the ICC seemed under control.
Well, he was free until someone told Fury about today’s little event.
He found Steve in the gym half an hour later, methodically killing a punching bag with only the lightest sheen of sweat to indicate his effort.
“So,” Tony began, trying not to ogle too openly. “How sorry do I have to be exactly? I mean, are we talking an apology and a trip to that gallery you were telling me about or do I have to fly us to the Uffizi for cocktails?”
Steve didn’t respond, taped knuckles continuing to pound a perfect repetition of blows on the slick red vinyl.
He was Tony Stark; he wasn’t familiar with being ignored. Tony toyed with the idea of walking out but then swallowed a sudden ball of real worry. Cap ignoring him was rude.
He’d thought the man incapable of being rude to anyone.
“Uffizi it is then.” He’d get Mrs. Arbogast to line up the jet.
The punching halted abruptly. Steve caught the bag and rested his forehead against it, eyes closed.
“You hate art.” His voice wasn’t exactly friendly, but at least he was acknowledging Tony’s existence.
“Not true,” Tony countered, daring a few feet closer. “I don’t like it, but that doesn’t mean it makes me angry or anything. I own heaps. You like it, I like you and I’m sorry I said that about the park. So we’ll go.”
The blue eyes were still closed but a small smile curled Cap’s lips. Tony relaxed a fraction.
“You can get us into the Uffizi Gallery?” Steve asked, intrigued.
Tony snorted. “I can get us in anywhere. We’d have to go in the evening when all the tourists aren’t queuing up outside. There’re only so many autographs I can sign after all.”
“No.” Steve disagreed, causing Tony’s stomach to drop and an internal monologue to begin cursing his arrogance. “I’d like to queue up like everyone else. It’s part of the experience.”
“…okay?” Tony couldn’t really agree that waiting in line for three hours with tired tourists was needed to appreciate the art inside, but if Steve was letting himself be flown to Florence with Tony then he’d stand in the damn queue all day if he had to.
“It’ll have to be next week, Nick needs me for….” Steve turned from the bag, words trailing off into nothing as he looked over at Tony. Tony saw the blue gaze take in the perfect hair, expensive shoes and the thousands of dollars of suit lovingly encasing his figure in between.
If Tony had been capable of blushing anymore, the heat in that blue gaze would have triggered one.
He smiled. “I have an awards ceremony tonight. You like the suit?”
Steve seemed to catch himself, wrenching his eyes back up to Tony’s. “Yes.”
“Good,” Tony turned and walked to the door, acutely aware of the likelihood of the other man’s gaze dropping again. “I’ll bring it to Florence.”