It makes no fucking sense and Tony wants to scream.
Throat tight, he breathes out shakily, and he knows there’s no point in saying it out loud but he does anyway, his question hanging heavily and unanswered between them.
“Where the hell have you gone, Cap?”
“What’re you doing?”
Steve smiles weakly at the sound of SJ’s sleepy yet curious voice. He lifts his head away from the back of the couch and looks down at SJ who is curled up on his side on the worn cushions, his head on Steve’s thigh and his eyes fixed on Steve’s fingers where they rest on the inside of his wrist, against his pulse-point.
“Just checking,” Steve replies, and SJ reaches out as well, pressing a finger in-between Steve’s, cool against his skin.
“Two,” Steve says, showing him, gently moving his hand into place, holding SJ’s fingers still so he can feel his pulse.
“I could just do this,” SJ says, pulling his hand away and sitting up, climbing into Steve’s lap and leaning against his chest with his ear resting over his heart.
“Or you could just do that,” Steve agrees, wincing slightly and shifting SJ so he doesn’t have a bony elbow sticking into his solar plexus.
SJ is quiet for a few long moments. He looks sleepy, despite having spent the last hour and a bit napping. “Is the Director going to come back?”
Steve hesitates. He absent-mindedly reaches up and smooths a hand over SJ’s head, pushing his soft blond hair away from his forehead. Normally, SJ would object to the ruffling – and Steve has plenty of memories of objecting when Bucky did the same to him when they were younger – but he just breathes out heavily and rubs his cheek against the fabric of Steve’s uniform.
“Don’t know,” Steve finally admits, not wanting to lie. He knows that the others have gone out to check that the Director and his crew are back across the river in the area that they normally haunt, but he’s not going to relax until they get back with a positive report.
“If I grew up I’d be like you and not that,” SJ yawns, and the simple sentence feels like a punch to Steve’s sternum. His throat goes alarmingly tight and he’s momentarily lost for words. God, there’s no doubt about what’s the right thing to do as both Steve Rogers and Captain America when it’s phrased like that. Well, ‘truth comes from the mouths of babes’ was what his Mom always used to say; at the time Steve had been nothing but suspicious of the phrase, because his Mom had clearly never listened to the tall tales that Eugene Jackson used to tell, but now it all slots into place and he finds a new and startling clarity about what she had meant.
“Good to know,” he finally opts for saying.
“Well, you or Shield,” SJ says. “Maybe Shield because he never got beat up by a robot.”
A laugh tumbles from Steve’s mouth, catching him by surprise. “Gee, thanks,” he says ruefully, and SJ grins up at him, looking pleased with himself.
Steve’s sharp ears catch the sound of approaching footsteps on the stairs; evidently the others have returned from their sweep of the area. He’s glad; now he’s over the initial shock of meeting the Director he’s got so many questions to ask. Some of the answers aren’t going to be easy to hear, but he wants to know. If he’s going to continue to be the good man he needs to be in order to live up to the role of Captain America, he needs to know.
“Come on then, move off,” he says to SJ, planting his fists into the cushions in order to push himself up-
“Nu-uh.” SJ instantly wraps both his arms around one of Steve’s, burrowing into his armpit and not shifting off his knee. Steve debates just picking him up and moving him, but he doesn’t have the heart, so he just stays where he is and looks expectantly towards the door.
Within seconds, Seven and Shield walk into the room, looking tired but not stressed or worried. Shield looks as serious as ever, back to business as if he’d not been shot only a few hours previously. Seven has got the remnants of a black eye but is otherwise looking fine.
“All clear?” Steve asks.
“All clear,” Shield says with a nod, and sits down heavily next to Steve, his hand moving up to press carefully against the wound on his shoulder. SJ wriggles his feet into Shield’s lap and his mouth flickers in a small smile as he lays a palm on SJ’s ankle. “Winter says they’re all the way up to where the 8th street bridge on the Passaic River should be, still heading north west. It’ll take him hours to get back here even if he decides to turn around and come back now.”
“What happened to him?”
Steve’s question hangs in the air, heavy and tense. Seven shifts around to sit on the floor opposite them, legs kicked out in front and weight wresting back on his hands. It’s hard for them all, Steve knows that, but they can’t avoid the issue. Maybe there’s something about the Director which he can learn; the key to him avoiding war in his own world and getting home.
“Someone needs to tell me,” Steve says when no-one answers, voice low and serious. SJ is very still, his eyes on Shield and clearly listening in.
Shield breathes out through his nose, slow and deliberate. “We don’t know,” he finally admits.
“What do you know?” Steve asks.
Shield and Seven exchange an unhappy glance. “As far as we can tell…he’s always been that way,” Shield tells him, his mouth a sorrowful twist. “He went through Project Rebirth, joined the army, went to war.”
“Did he – was he frozen, like us? Did he crash the plane?”
There’s another weighty pause, and then it’s Seven who speaks. “Yes,” he says. “But it was different. We think he murdered Erksine to make sure he would be the only super-solider, then founded Shield with Peggy and Howard before the end of the war. He was the heart of Shield, and when he woke up after being frozen he took it for himself. No-one questioned it.”
Steve’s mouth is dry, his stomach churning unpleasantly. “He murdered-”
He can’t even finish the sentence.
“We don’t know why,” Shield repeats bitterly. “But it looks that way.”
Steve shakes his head. No, that’s not right, he would never. He looks up as SJ shifts in his arms, leaning forwards and pressing fingertips to the back of the hand Shield has resting over the bullet wound. Shield nods, reaching out to ruffle SJ’s hair, and SJ smile is wobbly but true as he pulls his hand back.
“Why didn’t anyone stop him?” he asks, and his mind immediately goes to the one person who always calls him on his attitude when he gets stubborn, when he pushes too far with the team. “What about – what about Tony?”
Shield’s smile is depreciating and crooked. “In his universe, Tony Stark died in Afghanistan. He never knew him. No Iron Man, no Avengers.”
Steve shuts his eyes tightly, breathing out and feeling his throat constrict. He doesn’t need to know anymore. He doesn’t want to know anymore.
“And the other guy,” he manages to say, doing his utmost to keep his voice level. “Six-One-Eight.”
Shield’s face falls and he looks over towards Seven. Seven’s posture has gone completely rigid, his jaw set tightly. “He definitely wasn’t always like that. He - he killed Tony Stark during their Civil War,” he says abruptly, face twisting in anger. “The grief, the guilt over what he did…he couldn’t handle it.”
Steve feels like he could throw up. He opens his eyes, begging, pleading them to be wrong. “No,” he says, denial thick in his veins. “No, I would never-”
“It was war,” Shield says quietly. “We all know what war does to men. Even good men. Tony pushed and pushed and pushed, and he just…”
He trails off unhappily.
“That’s not an excuse,” Steve says tightly, and he needs to get home now, to check Tony is alive and well, to hang onto him for dear life and promise him that he’ll always have his back, do anything he can to make sure they never get to that point. “Christ, this is ridiculous – how can the relationship between two people, two people out of billions, have any impact on the way the world turns?"
“We don’t know, but it does,” Shield says abruptly, looking at Steve and frowning. “You think you and Tony – you think that that’s what you’ve gotta learn? That you have to be with Tony?”
“No,” Steve insists, shaking his head. “No I – I don’t know. I didn’t end up with him in every universe, did I? As long as we stay friends, as long as we don’t…”
He breathes out heavily, fingers clenching into a fist. He doesn’t want Tony like that, Tony doesn’t want him like that; all he needs is-
“It’s about having someone to keep us both in line, to remind us who we are, what we are.”
He knows it’s true the moment he says it. He blinks and looks from Seven to Shield, who are both completely focussed on what he has to say, expressions intense. “It’s – if we don’t communicate, we get so bent out of shape that we get out of line, we manage to create opposite sides in a damn war,” he says, and now he’s almost talking to himself, thinking hard. “When we do communicate-”
“We keep each other from missing the point,” Seven finishes for him.
Steve nods, mind turning over a thousand times a minute. “Tony needs – Tony needs someone to share with. Otherwise he takes it all on his own shoulders, he makes decisions and doesn’t tell us because he feels it’s all on him-”
