heroic_jawline | Entries tagged with cw

Steve stared out the window over the insanely advanced technology of Wakanda--surprise!--and the closed his eyes.

Next to him, Shuri--different version but still a nice kid--was taking measurements and muttering unflattering things to herself about ancient tech that Steve's ears were still catching. Sitting on the medical exam table, Bucky looked tired and vulnerable with only the one arm. Steve's fingers clenched in habit around a shield he no longer had. Tony had taken it back with him to Berlin to, Steve devoutly hoped, chuck it at the Secretary of State's head, though he thought that it being put into storage was probably more likely.

As Shuri completed her work, she mentioned something about her next appointment with Bucky, which didn't surprise Bucky at all but definitely came as news to Steve. As Shuri left the room, he turned his full attention to Bucky, eyes questioning.

"Stevie--" Bucky began and it was...well, it was not news Steve wanted to hear.

But it was fine. He was fine. He was a fugitive in a remote part of Africa without his shield or his team or his best friend starting tomorrow morning but it was fine.

He walked very carefully into the room he was sharing with his husband and closed the door, and only then did he allow himself--just for a second--not to be fine.

( And the fallout. )

The flight to Siberia was a mostly silent one with Bucky and Steve each lost in their own thoughts. At one point Bucky cleared his throat and asked quietly, "What's gonna happen to your friends?"

Steve's eyes closed briefly as he recalled the many pages in the Accords regarding incarceration. "Whatever it is, I'll deal with it," he said with a little shake of his head.

"Even with Tony?" Bucky asked. The pieces hadn't all fit together for him yet, but he could tell something was off.

"Even with Tony," Steve said.

"I don't know if I'm worth all of this, Steve," Bucky added.

Steve's jaw clenched as he looked back to where Bucky was seated. "What you did all those years...it wasn't you. You didn't have a choice." And Steve was a little focused on choice right now.

"I know," Bucky said, barely audible. "But I still did it."

After that there wasn't much left to say.

( Steve and Bucky remember how to be Steve and Bucky for a minute. )

( But then everything goes to shit. Because of course it does. )

[OOC: And we're done! Follows this and the zillion other posts over the last week. A thousand thanks to

imafuturist for listening to me whine about this movie for LITERAL YEARS NOW and for her NPC and PCing help. Especially during the fight scenes because they suck. NFI & NFB.]

Steve had spent the drive to the airport in seething silence, ignoring both the questioning glances from Bucky in the back seat and Sam's commentary from the passenger side.

He got out of the car, slamming the door hard enough to make the metal protest, and opened the trunk up to retrieve his suit.

"I am just saying," Sam said, getting out and shutting the door behind him before Bucky could move, "that if you are trying to take the high, dramatic road, it doesn't work when you grind the gears of your busted-up Volkswagen Beetle as you drive off."

"I wasn't being dramatic," Steve said.

"Right," came Bucky's dry response as he unfolded himself from the car. "Because Steve never does that."

Steve huffed out an irritated breath. "When's your guy arriving?" he asked Sam, glancing down at the "A" sewn into his uniform sleeve and swallowing around a lump in his throat. He wasn't breaking up the team. He was prioritizing his people.

( Plotting in the airport parking lot. As you do. )

( And everyone gets banged together like action figures )

So Steve's calls had gotten him almost nowhere, and his texts to the Avengers in Tony's universe had been left on read (thank you, Jan, that hadn't hurt his feelings at all), but he was out of time and that doctor already had a head-start to Siberia.

But Steve thought he could make up the time by not having to fly commercial, and there was a plane waiting for him at the airport. Whether the plane knew it was waiting for him was a matter of slight debate, but Steve was very firmly in the camp of "asking forgiveness and not permission" right now.

He still wasn't going to steal anything. He was just borrowing that airplane. And this Volkswagen Beetle.

...it was a good thing he knew how to drive stick still. He drove their amazing getaway vehicle, shut up, Sam, to the location that had been sent to him via text and breathed a little easier to see Sharon already waiting for them. Maybe today would go better than yesterday had.

( Three Morons in a Bug )

[OOC: Continues from here, canon stuck in blender and pulverized.]

While Sam went off to make a mysterious phone call, Steve unclamped Bucky from the vise--getting a tired smile and an eyebrow arch for his trouble--and then handed him the extra doner kebab Sam had brought. "Guessing you're hungry," he murmured. "I'll be back in a second. Don't go anywhere."

Then he pulled his phone out and texted Wanda up at the compound and Clint...wherever Clint went...and scrolled through his contacts for other people that might help. "Wanda (FH)" would get confusing with the other Wanda who was already coming. He wasn't entirely sure how much being tiny would help against an unknown amount of Buckys, so he moved past Scott for the moment, figuring he'd go back if he needed to. He mentally sorted through the people in his heroes class. Jane would also be a lot to explain in a short amount of time, and they needed to be stealthy on this op. It felt like Thors were not naturally stealthy. He didn't know the others well enough to ask them to face off against super soldiers help but Kitty...Kitty he knew.

He pulled her phone number up "Kitty (BAR)" and texted a quick: You busy?

There, super casual!

( Where Steve calls Kitty )

( And then Clint )

[OOC: After Tony's thing and a few minutes after the other one! Many thanks to

throughaphase and

so_hawkward for turning Steve down flat! I continue in my quest to make this movie make sense.]

It turned out that dragging along a sodden, unconscious super soldier with a metal arm after pulling down a helicopter and doing a rope climb the height of a stupidly tall government facility can really take it out of a fella.

So Steve had taken Bucky to the nearest unlocked warehouse, looked inside, seen no one, and called it good enough. The fact that it had an industrial vise was a major, unasked for, bonus. After dragging the vise to a better part of the room Steve clamped Bucky into it. He'd feel bad about it but the guy had literally tried to choke him to death while mid-helicopter crash so Steve was gonna call them even.

He slid to extremely dirty floor, closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. Then he took his phone out of his pocket and checked to see if it worked after its dunking in the water. Tony'd made it, so he was pretty sure it would be fine...and there was Tony's last text, bright on the screen: Rooftop.

Steve stared it for a long time, finger hovering over the reply button. But Tony wasn't from this universe and this whole thing was shaping up to be a hell of a mess as it was. He left the message on read and pulled up Sam's name instead, texting: have bucky. bring food.

After a moment he added, Not dead and dropped a pin for his location. There. Couldn't ask for clearer communcation than that!

And if Tony was really worried, he could check the tracking chip in Steve's wedding ring! That choice would definitely not bite Steve in the ass.

( Bucky? )

[OOC: Continued from here! Adapted from MCU canon, void in Quebec.]

The flight from Romania was as tense and silent as Steve had feared. Bucky was avoiding eye contact any time Steve glanced over and he'd caught Tony's tense, disappointed face a couple times before he'd stopped looking in that direction as well.

They arrived at a loading dock--Tony was staying back by the plane to avoid questions about two Tonys in he same place--and Steve got out of his SUV just as Bucky's pod was taken away via forklift. Steve's jaw clenched to see it.

"What's going to happen to him?" he demanded with his most righteous, Captain America is Disappointed in Your Choices frown aimed at the shorter, gray haired man clearly waiting for them.

"Same thing that ought to happen to you," the man replied, unaffected by the look. "Psychological evaluation and extradition."

Sharon came up beside them. "This is Everett Ross, Deputy Task Force Commander."

Steve pursed his lips in silent acknowledgement before asking, "What about our lawyer?"

"Lawyer. That's funny," Ross said, spinning on a shiny loafer and heading into the office, assuming everyone would just follow along. "See their weapons are placed in lockup." At Sam's glare, he added, "Oh, we'll write you a receipt."

"I better not look out the window and see anybody flying around in it," Sam retorted.

Steve glanced back one more time to finally meet Bucky's resigned, slightly defeated eyes.

"You'll be provided with an office instead of a cell," Ross was saying as he sped-walked through the facility. "Now do me a favor and stay in it?"

"I don't intend on going anywhere," T'Challa replied with a tiny nod before disappearing down a different corridor, a tall woman with a serious expression emerging from the shadows to follow him.

"For the record," Natasha said, appearing on Steve's left, "this is what making things worse looks like."

"He's alive," Steve said as they turned into a room and almost smacked into the other Tony in a three piece suit with his phone up by his ear. "No. Romania was not Accords-sanctioned. And Colonel Rhodes is supervising cleanup," Tony said, barely making eye contact with Steve before turning away.

"Try not to break anything while we fix this," Natasha said, all but physically stuffing Steve into an uncomfortable wheeled chair in front of a wooden conference table. At least, Steve thought, a little desperate for good news, the conference room had a good view of the command center monitors.

"Consequences?" Tony said into the phone, arching his eyebrows at Steve as he did so. "You bet there'll be consequences. Obviously you can quote me on that 'cause I just said it. Anything else? Thank you, sir."

He hung up.

"Consequences?" Steve repeated.

"Secretary Ross wants you both prosecuted. Had to give him something," Tony replied.

"I'm not getting that shield back, am I?" Steve asked.

"Technically, it's the government's property," Natasha said, not sounding the least bit regretful. "Wings, too."

"That's cold," Sam said, sitting down next to Steve at the conference table.

"Warmer than jail," Tony retorted as he and Natasha left Steve and Sam cooling their heels in that room.

( This will go well )

[OOC: Continued from here! Canon, again, beaten, folded and multilated to fit my vision. #noregrets]

Steve wasn't in London any longer. He'd slipped out of bed, grabbed his suit and left Tony a note--the gist was "I have to do this, please don't hate me"--and then grabbed Sam (whose expression when he didn't see Tony spoke volumes that Steve was just...not dealing with right now) and hopped a flight to Vienna where he'd managed to both track down Sharon and avoid Natasha, so score one for his sneaking skills.

Sharon had given him the one informant tip that wasn't spotting Bucky at a Gold's Gym somewhere near Stuttgart or Paris or Helsinki--a market in Romania--but also warned him that she was about to brief her boss on the lead and so Steve had about ten minutes before the task force mobilized. And they'd been ordered to shoot on sight.

Steve's jaw had clenched to hear that. This was the reason he'd inserted himself into this damn mess: to stop them--whoever them ever was--from killing his best friend. And so here he was, shield up, cowl on, and Sam's voice in his ear as he poked through a darkened apartment in Bucharest. Bucky had a very basic set-up: he wondered for a moment if this was how he lived in Fandom too, with a cooktop, a refrigerator, and a mattress on the floor. And then he felt guilty for not knowing, for not being able to make enough headway to even be invited inside.

A notebook on the top of the fridge caught his attention, edges worn and tabs out to mark certain areas. He opened it and found a printed out picture of himself in the Captain America outfit. Rumlow's voice echoed in his head: He remembered you. He got all weepy about it.

( Hello, Bucky. )

( Oh no, the consequences of my actions. )

[OOC: Continued from here, an apologies in advance for the incoming spam. Canon beat like a pinata until all the good parts came out, then added to about 150 percent more talking.]

Tony hadn't come up with an amazing third choice overnight that threaded the needle between signing the Accords and telling the United Nations to get bent, much to Steve's unspoken frustration. They were still staying in their London hotel--Steve wasn't in a rush to get home--and he ran into Sharon for an extremely awkward elevator ride while on his way down to meet Sam in the hotel restaurant for what was going to be a combination of breakfast and staring at the news coverage of the signing in Vienna. The breakfast would also give him a break from being in the same room as Tony, which he hated that he needed right now.

He shook himself out of his thoughts to realize Sharon had been chatting at him this entire time: "--My mom tried to talk me out of enlisting, but um, not Aunt Peggy." She smiled quickly. "She gave me my first thigh holster."

"Practical," Steve said with a quick smile back as they made their way across the lobby and into the restaurant. It wasn't Sharon's fault the entire world had its collective head up its posterior.

"And stylish," Sharon added.

Steve chuckled while he searched for a small talk topic. "So...the CIA has you stationed here in London now?"

She shook her head. "Berlin. Joint Terrorism Task Force."

"Right," Steve said little awkwardly. "Right. Sounds fun. I've been meaning to ask you," he added, "when you were spying on me from across the hall--"

"--doing my job," Sharon corrected, arching an eyebrow.

"--did Peggy know?" he asked.

She shook her head. "She kept so many secrets," she said, stepping into Steve's space with an expression he couldn't parse on her face. "I didn't want her to have one from you."

Steve opened his mouth to follow up when Sam interrupted them both. "Steve," he said, voice urgent. Steve twisted his head to meet his eyes and caught sight of explosions on the televisions behind him, chryons blaring about Vienna and the Accords and a terrorist attack. His heart dropped.

"There's something you need to see," Sam said unnecessarily. Steve was already jogging back toward the elevators, phone under his chin as he called Natasha.

No answer.

No answer.

No answer.

( Steve reacts with tact and grace. )

[OOC: Following this. Canon folded into origami cranes for my own personal entertainment.]

Peggy's funeral was on a beautiful morning, crisp air and a blue sky in October.

Steve didn't see any of it. He was locked in on putting one foot in front of the other and not breaking down in front of a cathedral full of strangers: thousands of people crammed in to pay their respects for all of the aspects that the vibrant, complicated, world-changing woman Margaret Carter had been.

Steve and the rest of the pallbearers (he was shouldering her up front, on her left. It felt correct.), made their way down the center aisle, and he was doing okay right up until he saw the photo they'd chosen to feature on the altar: Peggy from probably 1945 or so, leaping out of his memory and into sepia tones, staring back at him fiercely.

Chin up, now, Steve, a voice that sounded like hers chided in his head. Fifty feet to go. Twenty. Time to put the casket onto the catafalque, step away, let her go.

His mouth wobbled when his hand brushed against the Union Jack covering the casket as he made his way back to his seat, sliding in between Sam and Tony. His Tony. The other one was somewhere else in the press of mourners and hopefully far enough off that no one was going to notice that there were two Tony Starks at the funeral.

Steve let out a slow breath and blinked his reddened eyes. Thank God he didn't have to speak.

( Where everything is sad and awful. )

[OOC: Continuing from here.]

After the fiasco in Macau, Steve had known the UN was itching for a reason to implement the resolution that was much further along than they'd been telling him.

God, but he hated people not being truthful.

So now he was sitting in a conference room with the Avengers, forced to listen to Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross ramble about his heart surgery while going through footage of the Avengers' greatest explosions as Wanda stared at the table in front of her and fought back tears. Steve's jaw clenched stubbornly. He truly regretted the loss of Wakandan life in the explosion in Lagos--even if the Chinese were being much more over-the-top in their outrage than the countries who'd actually been injured--but this had been an operation where there'd been no good choices. He hadn't been going to let Rumlow or HYDRA get its hands on biological weapons and while, yes, Steve'd frozen for a second when Rumlow had gone off about Bucky, once Rumlow's suicide vest detonated Wanda had done her very best to keep the blast contained.

It could've taken out the entire market. They could all be dead. His hands balled into fists under the conference table as Ross flicked through photos of New York, Cape Town, Sokovia, and Lagos. "For the past four years, you've operated with unlimited power and no supervision," Ross concluded. "That's an arrangement the governments of the world can no longer tolerate. But I think we have a solution."

He slid a thick book across the table to stop in front of Wanda, who bit her lip. "The Sokovia Accords," she read.

Ross nodded. "Approved by 117 countries--" he said and Steve winced while Natasha sat up straighter, eyes assessing. China must've thrown its weight and those of its allies behind it. There hadn't been so many supporters three months ago. Half of the 195 delegates had still been wavering. "It states that the Avengers shall no longer be a private organization. Instead, they'll operate under the supervision of a United Nations panel, only when and if that panel deems it necessary."

It took a long beat before Steve felt that his voice would be calm enough to reply. "The Avengers were formed to make the world a safer place. I feel we've done that."

Ross arched an eyebrow at him. "Tell me, Captain, do you know where Thor and Banner are right now?"

Steve fought back a glare. Even if he did, he wouldn't tell.

"If I misplaced a couple of 30 megaton nukes, you can bet there'd be consequences," Ross said, smiling tightly at Steve before turning his attention to the rest of the team. "Compromise. Reassurance. That's how the world works. Believe me, this is the middle ground."

"So there are worse options too," Rhodey said from his seat, glancing at the document.

Ross didn't answer that. "The UN will ratify the accords in Vienna on Monday. Talk it over."

"And if we come to a decision you don't like?" Natasha asked.

"Then you retire," Ross said, sweeping out of the room.

( Where the Avengers have a mature discussion and come to a rational conclusion. Wait, no, the opposite of that. )

[OOC: Following this! Warning for NPC off-screen death.]

Another day, another exotic location. This time Steve was racing through a crowded market in Lagos, Nigeria, on the heels of Brock Rumlow and his goons who'd decided breaking into the Institute for Infectious Diseases and stealing biological weapons made for a fun Thursday. Steve knelt down to find helmets and gear on the ground and warned Sam, Natasha, and Wanda--they'd kept the team small out of deference to how things had gone in Macau with a bigger group--that the folks they were chasing were ditching their gear. "I got four," Sam said from the air. "They're splitting up."

"I got the two on the left," Natasha said.

"It's a shell game now," Steve said. "One of them has the payload."

Something clanked against his shield and he glanced down to see a bomb attached to it. Without thought, he threw it high and away from the crowd and it exploded just as something heavy and metal punched him straight through a fruit stand. And Steve had already been shot at and blown from a third story window today. Well. Sam wasn't wrong in saying Rumlow kind of hated them.

"There you are, you son of a bitch," Rumlow rasped, standing above him as Steve shook his head to clear it. "I've been waiting for it."

Over the comms, Sam was saying that his mercenaries didn't have the weapon. Steve half listened as Rumlow tried his best to punch Steve to death. "Payload secure," came Natasha'a reassuring voice. "Thanks, Sam."

Steve tuned out the patter about Sam's drone as Rumlow pinned him to a building and extended a knife from one of his gauntlets. "This is for dropping a building on my face," Rumlow growled, in too close.

Steve grabbed Rumlow's arm and pulled the gauntlet off but of course it wouldn't be that easy. Rumlow had another knife. Kicking Rumlow in the face and sending him flying into a clear area of the market felt more cathartic than it should've. Steve stalked towards him as Rumlow pulled the mask off, revealing, well, a face of someone who'd been squashed by the Triskelion collapsing. Steve refused to feel guilty about it. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Join HYDRA, get squashed by a collapsing building.

"I think I look pretty good, all things considered," Rumlow snarked.

"Who's your buyer?" Steve demanded.

Rumlow wasn't going to make it that easy. "You know, he knew you," he said instead, meeting Steve's eyes. "Your pal, your buddy, your Bucky."

Steve's grip on Rumlow's jacket tightened. "What did you say?"

"He remembered you," Brock said, eyes going soft and sincere. "I was there. He got all weepy about it. 'Til they put his brain back in a blender."

Steve couldn't move, just stood there, listening, heart beating loudly in his ears.

"He wanted you to know something," Brock said. "He said to me, 'Please tell Rogers…when you gotta go, you gotta go.'" His eyes turned tight and mean. "And you're coming with me."

Rumlow pressed the button attached to the suicide vest Steve hadn't even noticed because he'd been so caught up in Rumlow's words. The vest exploded and Steve flinched back, already knowing it was too late to do anything to protect himself.

The heat of the blast hit him squarely in the face, but the explosion was contained by a very familiar, very welcome, red mist. Steve glanced behind him to see Wanda with her hands outstretched and her face screwed up in concentration and no little pain as she lifted Rumlow--very definitely not surviving this--up and away from the marketplace.

The explosion, when she couldn't contain it any longer, ripped open the entire side of the office building in front of them.

"Oh, my--" Steve's voice trailed off as he tried to wrap his mind around the devastation. "Sam." He swallowed hard. "We need--" he blinked hard. "--we need fire and rescue on the south side of the building."

He looked over at Wanda, who had her hand clapped over her mouth in horror. "We gotta get up there."

[OOC: And here we go. Hold onto your butts.]

Steve was back from his normal run and enjoying the air conditioning of their apartment (which he'd turned up a little bit to make himself feel less guilty about being engaged to an engineering genius while everyone else was melting in the heat) and had showered and changed and was now sprawled out on the sofa with his Stark tablet, going through more of the exposed SHIELD files that Natasha had flagged for him in an email titled "Tugging on that Thread."

It was probably a bad idea to be reading the information, but Steve couldn't help himself. He'd been chasing Bucky for years and had gotten exactly nowhere. Maybe what SHIELD, well, Hydra, had on his past would give him some more leads to follow.

[OOC: For that guy! Let's detonate MCU canon today, shall we?]