domarzione | Captain America: the Winter Soldier vignette

Present Participle
600 words; PG-ish | Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, Sam Wilson

"I gotta tell you, Rogers," Tony began as he entered the hospital room, Pepper a step behind. "You certainly know how to call and raise. I blow up a house, you blow up half the government. Poker nights at the Tower are gonna be great.”

Steve looked up from his iPad and cocked an eyebrow, then smiled. “How are you, Miz Potts?”

"That’s my line,” she replied with fond exasperation.

"But I think I know where you’re coming from," Tony went on, taking in the room with its monitors and charts. "Newly acquired black flying sidekick, the Widow lying to you about something important, someone you thought you’d loved and lost turning out to be something other than what you thought they were… It’s an important developmental phase, like puberty but with bombs. Did you at least pick up the blonde who is too good for you but hasn’t realized it yet?"

"They’re letting me go tomorrow," Steve told Pepper, since Tony was still really talking to his invisible audience and not to Steve. "Not sure what my place looks like, though."

The disorder left by the EMTs and cops tending to Fury had probably been dwarfed by whatever SHIELD had done once Steve had been branded an outlaw.

Tony’s attention snapped back to him with a click that Steve would have sworn was audible. “Which is why we’re here. You’re moving back to New York.”

"…what?"

"Tower’s got space, you’re homeless and unemployed, it all works out," Tony replied, waving away any possible objection. "You shouldn’t have been down here, anyway. Nobody lives in the District if they don’t have to."

"Tony, what—"

Pepper stepped in then, explaining that they’d converted some of the repaired Stark Tower into a living and working space for the Avengers. “Away from SHIELD control, even before this, although we can’t claim foresight,” she said wryly. “But say you’ll come. Please?”

Which was how he found himself packing up his (tossed but largely intact) apartment with Sam, who actually agreed that it was the right move.

"You didn’t come down here for work," Sam told him as they wrapped glasses. "You came down here because it wasn’t familiar enough to weird you out. You don’t need that anymore."

"That the counselor talking?" Steve asked as he taped a box closed.

"That’s your newly acquired black flying sidekick," Sam corrected with a grin that broadened at Steve’s horrified expression. "Got a call from Colonel Rhodes. He’s surprisingly un-dickish for a field grade officer."

"He’s been friends with Tony Stark for twenty-five years," Steve replied, labeling the box with a magic marker. "It was going to go one way or the other."

Before he left, Sam told him to take his time getting settled in New York. “Sergeant Barnes’s trail’s already ice cold, time won’t make it any colder and you need to come to terms with what’s happened to you as well as to him. And that is the counselor talking.”

Steve drove his motorcycle north that evening, getting to Manhattan around midnight so that the traffic in midtown was only mildly horrible. Taking the Lincoln Tunnel meant going through Times Square en route to Stark Tower and, paused at a traffic light at Broadway, he looked around at where he’d once stood frozen and lost as Fury told him where and when he was, before it had become a warzone and then repaired and made gaudier than ever. Now it was just part of the scenery as he waited for the light to turn green and bring him closer to his future.