"Eight o'clock on the dot. Don't you dare be late. Understood?"

"You know, I still don't know how to dance."

"I'll show you how. Just be there."

"We'll have the band play something slow. I'd hate to step on your – "

Ice. Pain. Cold.

Steve blinked awake with a gasp. Around him, the windows subtly undimmed, letting the lights of pre-dawn New York in through the one-way glass. Not quite as good as the holograms in Tony's workshop for grounding him in the here-and-now, but he'd take it.

"Thanks, JARVIS," he murmured, sitting up and scrubbing a hand through his hair. JARVIS didn't reply verbally, but the windows brightened a bit more. Steve took several careful, slow breaths, then threw back the covers and climbed out of the king-sized bed. Most of the time, he was grateful for the luxury that Tony had insisted on, despite Steve's claims that he'd be fine with something smaller. The enormous bed let him sprawl out however he wanted, without worrying that he was going to fall off the edge, like he had sometimes from the army cots, or, later, SHIELD bunks. But at other, rarer times, he felt like he was drowning in it, unable to escape from its ridiculous lavishness. Leo, his psychiatrist, thought that there was a great deal of symbolism in that; Steve was still undecided.

Having successfully freed himself from the confines of the bed, Steve dressed quickly. After coming back from his month-long road-trip and moving in, it had taken him a few weeks to be willing to change in front of what looked like all of New York– especially since news helicopters occasionally liked to hover in front of the windows. When he'd mentioned it to Tony, however, the other man had flown him up with the Iron Man suit and dangled him in front of the glass until he'd been forced to admit that it was perfectly opaque from the other side. Steve still had JARVIS black out the windows when the helicopters were flying around, though.

He grabbed his running shoes, slipping them on and tying them neatly, and then his phone. A quick glance at the front showed that it was reaching 4:00. He'd have been up in another hour anyway, and an hour's lost sleep wouldn't hinder him.

Outside, the air was cold, but Steve set a pace that nearly any other man would have considered a sprint, and quickly worked up a sweat. The rhythm of his feet pounding against pavement eased the tight coil of anxiety in his chest and allowing him to think on the dream without getting lost in it. Why had he had that dream again, tonight? It had been – Steve thought, and was surprised to realize that it had been over two months since he'd had it last. He had nightmares occasionally, but more and more they were focused on his worries in the present: another invasion, or letting his new team down.

Leo would probably tell him not to worry much about the why. Everybody got nostalgic sometimes. Steve ran, and let himself think of Peggy: the red of her lips and the curl of her hair, the fire in her eyes. Her bravery, her cool-headedness in the face of danger. Her accent when she said his name - she'd still said it like that, when he'd last seen her, even if she often lost the thread of conversation.

It ached, but it felt... good, to think back with fondness on what had been.

Two hours later, as the sky was starting to lighten, he pounded his way back along the sidewalk, through the first rush of 6am commuters. A few of Tony's more dedicated people were already entering Stark Tower, some of them nodding to Steve as he jogged up the steps and through the lobby. He could have taken the side-door, a more discreet way of reaching the elevator that went up to the Avenger's penthouse suites, but he was trying – if slowly – to get used to the press of people again, as changed as it was by the presence of cell phones and Bluetooth devices. The first few times he'd come back this way in the early morning, he'd been asked for autographs, but by now the early morning workers had gotten used to his presence.

"Is Tony still up?" he asked JARVIS as the elevator ascended. Tony was very much not a morning person, but he was a late-night person. A very, very late-night person. Steve had made a habit of taking breakfast to him in the workshop, if he hadn't yet gone to bed when Steve got back from his run – which was often. Steve could get by on little sleep, but for Tony it was his default state, especially when he was working – much to Pepper's... chagrin over the last few months. Steve could no longer recall how many times he'd wandered into Tony's workshop late at night, fallen asleep on the couch, and woken up the next morning to find Tony still working.

"JARVIS?" Steve asked after a moment, when he got no reply. The elevator reached his floor with a soft 'ding', and he stepped out to find the lights exactly as he'd left them. "JARVIS?" he asked again, a bit more cautiously.

He got no reply, so Steve stepped back into the elevator, pressing the button for Tony's workshop's floor. A shower could wait; honestly, if Tony was awake at this hour, then he would never notice. The quiet humming of the elevator felt odd, even though JARVIS normally didn't speak out of the blue – but it was the difference between having a naturally quiet companion, and looking around only to find that they'd disappeared.

The elevator dinged open again, revealing Tony standing in front of his closed workshop door. Through the glass, Steve could see into the workshop beyond – as always, it was a mess of parts, half-completed projects piling up on each other. As far as Steve could tell, Tony's work ethic alternated between insanely single-minded focus and wildly scattered multi-tasking; and even if Steve was much more up to date these days, Tony's projects were so far into the future that he'd long ago given up any hope of understanding them.

Steve stepped out onto the tile floor, making his footfalls heavy enough that Tony would hear him coming. He could be a bit odd about people sneaking up on him, early in the morning. Sure enough, Tony whirled around to face him, almost jumping in surprise. Steve found himself smiling fondly. This was the side of Tony Stark that almost no one else got to see: not the polished, witty genius always ready with a quip, or the more bitterly sarcastic man whose public screw-ups Fox liked to re-run on slow news days, but the inventor. The mechanic. Tony was wearing one of his ratty shirts with the hole cut out in the middle, wires snaking under it and connecting the arc reactor in his chest to the bare-frame repulsor gauntlet on his left hand. His right hand was stained with grease, as was his cheek, and, if Steve knew him, his hair – which was standing akimbo on his head. His eyes were glazed over, a clear sign that coffee wasn't going to cut it for refueling: he'd need some actual sleep. Maybe Steve could distract him with breakfast and get him to go to bed. Amusingly, his jaw had dropped open, as if Steve's presence outside his workshop was somehow astonishing – or maybe he'd been about to talk to himself. He did that. A lot.

"JARVIS isn't responding," Steve said. He glanced at the repulsor gauntlet and frowned. "It wasn't SHIELD again, was it?" When he'd found out about the true extent of SHIELD's private cyber-war with Tony, Steve had been horrified about the manner in which JARVIS had been treated – and had let Fury know that in no uncertain terms. Just because JARVIS wasn't human didn't mean he wasn't a person...even if only a dozen people actually knew that.

"JARVIS? No, that was, uh – that was me," Tony replied after a pause, off-kilter. His eyes raked over Steve, dark and unreadable.

Steve blinked in surprise. Tony worked closely with JARVIS, but JARVIS had long ago explained that he could take care of any diagnostics himself. "Is he okay?" He let some of his deeper concern show. Why had Tony needed to take JARVIS offline? That sounded serious.

"What?" Tony asked, sounding bewildered, and then hurriedly said, "No – uh, he's fine. Just. Uh. Not online. Are you okay?"

"I'm good," Steve said bemusedly. Tony was often very weird in the mornings – but it was definitely past time to start prodding him to get some sleep. He was going to have to team up with Bruce to drag him out of the workshop after this, too. If Tony was getting erratic enough to do something that put JARVIS out of commission, then the situation required active intervention. "How about I make some breakfast?"

"Sure," Tony agreed quickly. He gave Steve one last long look, and then turned back to the workshop door, saying quietly, "I just have to – fix things here."

"Okay," Steve said, humoring him. He stepped back into the elevator.

The doors closed on the sight of Tony keying in the workshop code, shoulders slumped. "...nutshell..." Steve heard him mumble, and Steve wondered what he'd been doing, although he knew he probably wouldn't understand even if Tony explained it to him.

When he'd first met him, Steve wouldn't have pegged Tony as an obsessive workaholic. Pepper, before she'd left permanently for the west coast, had mentioned that Tony was far worse since the invasion, but perhaps that was understandable. Now that she was gone, dragging him out of his workshop had fallen mostly to Steve. Bruce tried occasionally, but Tony could distract him too easily with science.

After a quick shower, Steve went back down to the common kitchen and pulled out a carton of eggs, broke all dozen of them into a large frying pan, and set it on Tony's futuristic stove to start cooking. Rummaging in the fridge, he found various things to add – mushrooms, bacon, green onions – neatly packaged by the people that JARVIS ordered their food from. Steve would be eating most of it, by far, but he'd leave out a plate for Bruce, whenever he wandered into the kitchen after finishing his morning session of meditation. Steve had joined him once or twice, but on the whole he preferred running as a method of clearing his mind.

Steve hummed an old show-tune as he scrambled the eggs, the familiar routine relaxing him from his worries over Tony and JARVIS. He made breakfast most mornings, when Clint and Natasha were on assignment – otherwise, that was Clint's thing, and Steve happily conceded the title of chef to him. Clint's omelets were amazing. Even Tony bothered to have breakfast most mornings, when Clint was around to cook.

He turned off the heat and scraped reasonable-size portions onto plates for Bruce and Tony, covered Bruce's with another plate, and then upended the skillet and poured the rest of the eggs into a large bowl for himself. Balancing the plate and bowl effortlessly – although he was never unaware of it; he'd been scrawny and graceless for too much of his life to ever take it for granted – he made his way back downstairs.

Tony, at least, was no longer standing outside his workshop door, staring off into space. Steve stepped up to the workshop windows and peered through into the darkness beyond. A few of the overhead lights were still off, but the rest were dim enough that it was easy to pick out Tony's location from the glow of the reactor. In the far corner of the workshop, blue light poured up onto the ceiling – what was Tony doing on the floor? Had he fallen asleep?

"JARVIS?" Steve asked experimentally, but there was still no reply. Well, maybe Tony had just decided to work on the floor, then. He wouldn't have fallen asleep without getting JARVIS back first.

He keyed in his code, opening the door. The workshop beyond was eerily still – Tony's robots should have been moving around; at least one always came to greet him. He glanced around, but it took him a moment to sort out the general debris of the shop from what he was seeing – DUM-E was knocked over, wires fried, completely disabled by what looked like a repulsor blast; U lay blasted to pieces to Steve's left, near the door but hidden from the windows.

"Tony?"

Steve walked further into the shop, keeping a careful eye on the ground so he didn't trip. The smell of burning hit his nose at about the same time he found Tony.

Steve stopped.

"Oh, God," he heard himself say, right before he threw up into his bowl of eggs.

There was only bile to come up. When he was done he set the bowl and plate down carefully, somehow unable to contribute to the general mess of the shop. He took one step closer to – to the body, and felt dizzy, like the world had slid out from underneath him again.

When reality stopped being so fuzzy, he found himself sitting on the floor beside Tony's crumpled body. He had – he had no idea what to do. Tony was – Tony had – had –

Somehow, his phone was in his hand. He blinked at it, not recalling pulling it from his pocket, but not daring to question it, either. Carefully, he unlocked it and pressed the emergency button for SHIELD, although that felt a bit wrong. There was no emergency. There had been an emergency – oh, God, he had gone upstairs and cooked breakfast – but there wasn't now.

"Captain," Fury's voice came from the phone, as clear as if they were in the same room. It was, after all, StarkTech.

"Tony's dead," Steve said numbly. "He... his head is gone."

Repulsor burns cauterized. Steve couldn't stop staring at the stump.

Fury was quiet for a long moment. The phone didn't pick up on background noise – it was StarkTech, it didn't transmit background interference unless the user wanted it to do so. In his head, Steve could imagine the picture on the Helicarrier; Fury was undoubtedly waving directions at people. He wondered if he was on speaker. Had he just announced Tony's death to the entire bridge? He thought that would probably be a bad thing, but he felt too disconnected to figure out why.

"What's the situation? Are you injured?" Fury asked, with that same calmness he'd had when pitching the Avengers at Steve all those months ago. Then, Steve had resented the implication that heneeded calmness to keep him grounded. Now, he just didn't care.

"No. I'm – " his throat closed up around the word fine. "I was just bringing him breakfast."

It hadn't even been twenty minutes since he'd talked to Tony earlier. Since Tony had been alive.

Since Tony had gone back into his lab and killed himself.

Fury's presence didn't register in Steve's brain until the director sat down on the floor beside him. At any other time, it would have been laughable. Nicholas Fury was not the sort of man who sat on floors.

There were SHIELD personnel examining the body, Steve realized belatedly. He wondered what they were looking for; the cause of death was pretty damn obvious. One of them, a woman, picked up one of Tony's hands, placing his limp finger onto some type of device, which let out a series of beeps. The medtech looked up at Fury. "It's him, sir."

Fury nodded. "Triple-check," he ordered, levering himself to his feet in a smooth motion. He held out one hand to Steve, and then, when Steve made no move to take it, leaned down to grab his upper arm and haul him to his feet. Somebody else had grabbed his other arm. "On your feet, soldier."

"Jesus, I can't believe it," Bruce mumbled from Steve's left – he was the guy holding onto Steve's other arm. He hadn't let go, but without the support Steve probably would have fallen over again. His body felt weird, weak and shaky, like the first time he'd woken up after the ice.

Fury led them into the elevator; a non-descript SHIELD agent followed them. That, too, reminded Steve of the first few months he'd been out of the ice, before Loki and the Chitauri, when he'd been constantly followed. Constantly watched. They'd thought him a suicide risk back then, when his whole world had been yanked out from underneath him. Funny how he felt so adrift again, when only one thing had changed.

He suddenly felt a flood of empathy for his minders, though. God in heaven, he had talked to Tony right before. If he had just stayed – Oh, Lord –

"I don't understand," Bruce said, his voice shaking, as the elevator let them out on the communal floor. "This is – so out of character. Tony's not the type to – why would he do that?"

"We're hoping you can help us figure that out, Dr. Banner," Fury replied, still with that same calmness. Steve wandered over to a couch and sat down heavily, staring at his hands helplessly. He felt like there was something he should be doing – but it was too late. Everything he might have done, should have done – it was too late.

"JARVIS is offline, and my agents are reporting that the hardware here and at the major SI plants was gutted." Fury didn't say who had done it – he didn't have to. Steve's memory, crystal-clear as always, supplied him with the scene again: the smell of burning plastic and metal mingled with the stench of charred flesh. "He had control of all the security – records that we need. But the techs haven't managed to bring him back online here."

"I'm not – I'm not really a programmer. If there's something gone wrong with JARVIS – you need Pepper, not me," Steve heard Bruce demure. "There's no question that Tony has copies – copies and copies, sometimes I don't think he ever deletes anything, but that's all keyed to Pepper..."

The grimace came through in Fury's voice. "We... haven't informed Ms. Potts yet. I was hoping that we'd have some answers for her before I did."

"She deserves to know," Steve told his hands. He clenched them into fists – but that was useless. He relaxed them again. There was nothing here he could fight, no speech he could make, nothing he could say. At all.

"She does," Bruce said, backing him up with barely a pause for thought. "She really does. And if JARVIS is down – she's probably already trying to get hold of Tony..."

"Be that as it may," Nick's voice left it clear he knew that Pepper was already making inquiries, "in the short time during which I can delay informing her, I'd like us to get all the answers that we possibly can."

"Does it matter?" Steve wondered quietly.

Silence. He could feel them looking at him. Were they assessing? Sympathizing? His brain seemed to be – Tony would have said it was rebooting.

"I find it hard to believe that Stark would take his life of his own volition, Captain," Fury said finally. "He is a man who has fought very hard to live."

"Okay," Steve breathed. Okay. He remembered Bucky falling from the train, into the icy grips of the mountain. He'd thought that getting revenge, getting justice against the Red Skull would help – but there hadn't been any time left. Schmidt had died and then Steve had followed suit, and that he'd woken up seventy years later hadn't made it better.

He'd just gone upstairs to make breakfast. But how could he, of all people, have thought that there would be time later? There was never time later. There was never a 'later'.

"Tell me what you find," Steve said, his mouth automatically adding, "Sir," although not very respectfully. He still couldn't summon up enough energy to care. He stood, and strode back to the elevator. If there was a target, an enemy, the Avengers would find it. Until then, he'd have to settle for breaking punching bags instead. Nothing would bring Tony back to life; the best he could do was try to protect the friends he had left.

Before they were gone, too.

Some hours later, he was still at it, although he should have been at SHIELD headquarters over an hour before for hand-to-hand combat practice with the instructors there. The serum could substitute for a lot of things, but formal training pushed him even further. With the serum alone he could take on any of the instructors and win – with it and more advanced training, next time, he might not need Tony's help against someone like Loki.

Next time, he wouldn't have Tony's help. His fists hit the bag again, three times in quick succession, the impacts jolting up his arms.

His SHIELD watcher still stood unobtrusively in the corner. Steve alternated between a fuzzy state of not caring, and wishing that the man would go away. He'd lost everything before, and he hadn't been suicidal then. He couldn't be. He owed too much to too many people to contemplate wasting their sacrifices. Erskine's face swam before his mind, and he hit the bag with a heavy left hook, following it up with two right jabs.

Tony had told him about Afghanistan. Six weeks ago – three and a half months after Steve came back from his road trip; scant time to strike up such a friendship, but of course there were extenuating circumstances. They'd been drinking – Tony drank a lot. At least with Steve, he had someone who could keep him company without losing their own good judgement... not that Tony wasn't devilishly skilled at stealing that from him anyway. Somehow, they'd gotten on to the topic of the super soldier serum, and Tony had started rambling on about the development of the Vita-Rays – Steve hadn't known that they were key to waking him up from the ice. Steve had mentioned Erskine, and Tony... Tony had understood. Had told him about another foreign doctor, seventy years later, who had given his life for a would-be American superhero.

"He was another captive," Tony had explained, his fingers tapping restlessly at the reactor beneath his shirt. Despite how much alcohol he'd consumed, his speech was as clear as ever; Tony only started slurring his words when he was caffeine-deprived. "He saved my life – god knows how many times. Got himself killed the last time. I still don't know – he was a better man. How am I supposed to live up to someone like that? It's impossible."

"You do six impossible things before breakfast," Steve had pointed out, before looking away. "I thought once – I thought once that I was done. That I'd fulfilled expectations. But it's not about that. You have to keep on going, doing the right thing – and maybe you fail. But it's the attempt that matters. And you're a good man, Tony."

"I'm a war profiteer."

"Not anymore."

"And that's good enough? Fuck, Steve, I can never live it down. I tallied it up, once – how many lives I've ruined, how many I've saved. No matter how long I keep doing the Iron Man thing the scales are gonna be covered in blood."

"You saved New York," Steve had replied. "How many millions of people live in this city?"

"That wasn't – that doesn't count." It was something Tony would never have said while sober – he'd been quick enough to boast about the feat before. But Tony's guard had been down that night. "That was just – that doesn't count." There'd been grief in his voice, raw and dark and personal.

Steve had stared at him for a long time, and then punched him lightly on the shoulder. "Do you even listen to yourself?"

He hadn't understood it, then. He hadn't yet figured out the reason behind the map in Bruce's lab, the one showing concentric circles of potential nuclear death.

In the present, Steve hit the bag with enough force to have sent it flying, were it not one of the specially reinforced bags that Tony had made up after seeing Steve go through a half-dozen of the regular ones in a single workout. Fury was right; Tony wasn't the type to take his own life. It took a hell of a lot to make the man give up.

But – it didn't matter. Even if he could track down an enemy, and gain justice – for this, it didn't matter. Tony was dead. Tony, the man he'd gotten to know best in this strange new world – who built him a motorcycle and dragged him out for baseball games in-between three-day stints in the lab, who seemed all flash and no substance and threw himself between a nuke and New York City, who turned a fatal heart condition into a superpower, who was willing to watch Saturday morning cartoons on the couch with Steve but only if he had his tablet so that he could actually be working on cheaper prosthetics for amputees – a charity write-off, he'd called it. Steve felt something drip down his cheek, and didn't bother to pretend it was sweat.

This was – it was useless. Steve unwrapped his hands and tossed the tape on the floor, let it lie where it landed. Cleaning up was pointless; he'd be back down here again in a few hours or less. He took the emergency stairs four at a time, listening to his tail breathe heavily as the smaller man – the more human man – tried to keep up. The door out onto the roof wasn't locked – it never was – although the wind tried to keep it closed. It was always windy up on top of the Tower. Car horns drifted up from the streets below; New York was never silent.

Steve stood at the rail and looked down. His enhanced eyesight let him pick out the expressions on individual commuters' faces: boredom, irritation, worry, cheer. The ground was very far away. What had Tony seen, looking into the face of death? Death in battle, by injury... that was something else, something different from the cold contemplation of the jump.

"It wasn't your fault," Natasha's voice cut across the wind, low and even. She'd gotten within ten feet of him before he'd noticed her. His watcher had vanished, probably back into the emergency stairwell, ready to resume his post like a good guard dog as soon as Natasha called him to heel. The thought was uncharitable – but Steve didn't have any charity left.

"I should have seen something," Steve replied finally, after the silence between them stretched to breaking point. Even it hurt. Tony chattered, through such awkward silences, on and on and – never again.

"It doesn't always work like that."

"I was talking to him minutes before," Steve replied, at last vocalizing the thought. Oddly, it didn't make him feel any less distant. "It doesn't matter whether Fury's right or not, whether there was something else going on. I should have seen it."

"You're not trained for that. No one expected it of you."

Her voice was as neutral as ever, but something in Steve sat up and took note anyway. Steve let her catch his eyes with hers. "It wasn't your fault either. You were on a mission." When had she gotten back, anyway? What was she abandoning by pulling out so fast? Had Fury ordered it because he wanted to keep his team together, or did he really think there was some conspiracy behind Tony's – death?

She blinked at him. "I know."

Maybe she didn't need the reassurance he'd offered. Maybe it was just him wanting to take care of the people under his command – to shoulder their burdens instead of his own. He looked away, back out at the city.

"His psych profile. You wrote it up?"

"Steve..."

"I know," he said, holding up a hand to forestall further reassurance. "I just... want to see if it matches." Or how badly it mismatched. If Fury was wrong – if it wasn't a setup – how could he possibly go on trusting his own judgement?

Natasha settled against the rail with a sigh. "For someone convinced he's a narcissist he has a lot of self-worth issues, but his signature expression of it was mania, not depression. He'd either invent a solution to his problems or party hard enough to forget them." She leaned out, joining him in his contemplation of the city, although her normal human eyesight couldn't show her everything that his showed him. "He didn't take the invasion well, but working longer hours seemed to be helping him cope."

"I thought he was just tired." The Lord knew that Steve felt tired, a bone-deep weariness that had nothing to do with having spent the last few hours doing a heavy workout.

Natasha said nothing, letting the silence settle again, not pressing him. But the silence itself felt like a weight. "I came by to ask him what had happened to JARVIS," Steve recounted slowly, "and he was just standing outside his workshop. I asked, and he said it was his doing, but that JARVIS was fine – I should've known then. He's never that dismissive of JARVIS."

"It was 6am," Natasha said. "Tony's always weird at that hour."

"He asked if I was okay..." Steve trailed off. Had that been a clue that he'd been under some sort of external pressure? Or that he'd already decided, then? Tony thought that stopping a nuke from hitting Manhattan, almost at the cost of his own life, didn't count as heroism; Steve would not have been surprised to learn that he'd worry about a friend while contemplating his own death, even if his active role in that death was still in doubt. Though the scene he'd stumbled onto in the workshop... was pretty damn convincing.

Over the wind, he heard a tiny voice speaking words he couldn't quite make out. Natasha tilted her head – it was coming from her earbud. Had she not bothered to remove it after being recalled, or was she on another mission now?

"Pepper's arrived," Natasha said quietly. "She brought a backup drive with JARVIS. She wants to see you."

"Oh," said Steve. He didn't move. What the hell was he supposed to say to Pepper? What the hell could he do? When it had mattered, he'd failed Tony – failed him in the worst possible way. If he – he should be the last person on Earth that Pepper Potts would want to see right now, or ever again.

"Steve," Natasha said. She didn't reach out to touch him, lay a hand on his arm – she kept her distance. On her tongue his name wasn't a question or a command, but merely a statement, a reminder of where he was here and now.

"Okay," he said, and he let go of the railing and went back inside.

Pepper was sitting in the living room, on one of the horrid couches that looked terribly uncomfortable and were not at all. There was a large, heavy briefcase sitting in her lap, connected by a thick metal cable to a handcuff around her wrist. It wasn't an ordinary handcuff; it must have been two inches wide, at least, and Steve suspected it was chock full of Stark technology. Mere steel wouldn't deter the sort of enemies that Tony Stark tended to attract. It certainly wouldn't deter SHIELD, which could be the only possible reason that Pepper was still wearing the cuff even in the Tower.

Her name on his lips felt cold, sharp like tiny particles of ice cutting into his gums. "Ma'am," he said instead, and she jumped slightly, turning to look at him with red-rimmed eyes. Everything else about her was as perfectly put-together as always.

"Steve," she said. Her eyes flickered to the case and then back up, meeting his squarely; Steve had to fight not to squirm. "I'm not naive enough to think SHIELD wouldn't lie about this for their own reasons. Or to think that they don't have the means to produce a – a body that would fool an independent DNA test. But you wouldn't lie to me." There was challenge in her voice, in her eyes – challenge and hope and resignation, because long before Tony Stark built himself an iron suit and blasted his way out of Afghanistan, he had never been fated to die of old age.

"I'm sorry," Steve said. His voice cracked on the last word and he repeated himself, helplessly, "I'm sorry."

Pepper's face crumpled. She shrunk into herself, her shoulders hunching as she bowed her face towards the briefcase. She didn't blink; after a moment, her eyelashes were wet with unshed tears. Steve swallowed hard and looked away.

Footprints came from behind him. Not an agent – not stealthy enough, quiet enough for that – Bruce's: measured, paced, even now. Always. "Pepper..." said Bruce, crossing the floor to sit down beside her, take one of her hands in his own and squeeze.

She squeezed back, then buried her face in the shoulder of his suit jacket – never mind that it cost upward of four figures. Bought by Tony, like the rest of Bruce's clothes, of course. It wouldn't matter; Steve was probably the only one who noticed the tear-stains setting in, the way he noticed almost everything, the serum letting him see so much more. Tony noticed details like that too, but that was all genius, no serum involved – noticing was part of how he figured out how to put everything together.

Steve had always thought he was pretty good at putting things together, too. Never again.

"I'm sorry," Pepper muttered. Bruce hummed low in his throat, a soothing sound that Steve barely heard, and rubbed her back awkwardly – used to personal grief, but not used to the expression of it in others close to him. Steve felt like a stranger, an alien, just like he had after waking up – a man out of time, in a world that wasn't his own. He shouldn't be here, watching this. He turned to leave.

"Wait. Steve," Pepper said, disengaging herself from Bruce with a sniff. She took a packet of tissues from her purse and shook one out, then blotted her eyes with it; mascara stained the soft white paper, as well as tears. Her nose had gone all blotchy from crying – the curse of redheads. Steve waited. "I need – I need a second access code to open the case. Jim won't be here for hours."

The name felt like a punch to the chest – even after so many months after waking from the ice, and knowing that she meant James Rhodes, Tony's best friend, and not James Barnes, a man who had been dead for seventy years. Rhodey had stayed at the Tower on two occasions, when he'd had leave – most recently, when Pepper and Tony had broken up. Three days after Tony had first gotten completely wasted and cried himself to sleep, Steve had given up trying to coax Tony out of the workshop and called Rhodes, desperate for someone who could make Tony Stark put down the bottle and go to bed.

He wondered how hard Rhodey would punch him when he found out that Steve had let his best friend kill himself. He couldn't possibly hit him as hard as Steve deserved, in the armour or out.

Steve looked at Bruce. It didn't make sense that the case would be keyed to Steve – surely Bruce, better with all things science, would be the logical choice. "Not you?"

Pepper was the one to answer – of course, she would be. "Your name is the one on the list," she said. Her voice wobbled slightly, steadied. "It has been for months." She stood, hefting the case with visible effort – if it was solid metal throughout, then it must be heavy. Politeness kicked in, from some place inside Steve that he'd thought had frozen through; he crossed over to her with long strides and took the case from her. It left him standing quite near to her – for a moment, he was afraid that she would hug him, too. Part of him wished she would.

"Thank you," she said instead, leading the way to the elevator.

The lab still smelled like smoke to him when they reached it – smoke, and burning metal, and overcooked meat. Steve fought down the urge to gag, to press his hands over his nose. Agents looked up at their approach and shuffled out of their way, some reluctantly. They all had the look of geeks – salivating to be able to work on Tony's private tech. Steve felt anger well up in him.

"Ms. Potts," said Fury, stepping out from where he'd been talking to another tech.

"Director," Pepper said, meeting Fury's eyes squarely. Her expression was hard, ice-cold – he'd seen that look before. If push came to shove, Steve sensed that she would not be the one bending. She'd die first. For what cause, Steve didn't know. Tony was dead – arguing with Fury wouldn't change that.

"I'm sorry," Fury said evenly. He made a gesture and the remaining techs reluctantly left, some shooting longing looks over their shoulders as they did so. Steve wanted to spit at them, to shout at them – how dare they look like that, when the only reason they were here at all was – was – he said nothing. There was nothing to say, nothing that mattered.

Pepper didn't reply. She turned toward the blasted server-box, instead – the techs had stripped off the outer wall and cooling systems, removing the destroyed pieces and leaving the remains. She gestured for Steve to put the case on top of one of the racks, then took a breath and said clearly, "Voice-print authorization, delta-nine-two-seven, apple-whiskey-tango-foxtrot, twenty-eight thirty-four, foxtrot-Stark-four-Pepper." A green light lit up on the metal cuff; an LED beside it remained blank. Pepper looked up at him. "Captain?"

His throat felt suddenly dry. He cleared it. "Captain Steve Rogers, Stark Tower authorization code thirty-four, forty-four, fifty-four, sixty-four."

The cuff snapped free of Pepper's wrist as the suitcase began to transform, the sides flipping inside-out to display access ports, cabling. Pepper grabbed a data cable and a power cord and plugged them both in. "In case you were wondering, Director, this is a one-time authorization code only," she said as the case finished transforming. "JARVIS: Echo-two-four, genesis."

They all waited for a moment, but nothing happened except a faint hiccup in the lights. Then JARVIS's voice sounded from everywhere and nowhere, speaking in a dull, unhurried tone, without any sense of sarcasm, humour, or life. "Connected to Tower facilities. Uploading to armour. Upload failed: missing hardware. Uploading to Tower facilities. Upload failed: missing hardware. Uploading to Malibu facilities. Upload failed: missing hardware. Uploading to Odessa facilities. Upload failed: missing hardware. Uploading to Shēnzhèn facilities. Upload failed: no connection. Uploading to Delhi facilities. Upload failed: no connection. Uploading to Toyko facilities. Upload failed: missing hardware. Uploading to satellite network. Upload complete."

Pepper breathed out, hard. "That – explains the calls I've been getting," she said faintly.

"JARVIS," said Fury, "What the hell happened?"

There was silence for a second. That had to be deliberate – JARVIS's processing power was, Tony had assured him, "Astronomically far off the charts. Laughably far. Like the rest of the world thinks Mumbai is a long way away while we're looking at Alpha Centauri -far. Okay, maybe not that far. But we'll get there."

"I am unable to ascertain any logical explanation for this state of affairs," JARVIS said finally. His voice was no longer dull and emotionless: now he was worried. "The armour is not responding. Where is Mr. Stark?"

Cold washed over Steve. Around him, everyone else was tensing, in their own ways: Pepper looked horrified; Fury grew grimmer; Natasha and Clint went blanker. Bruce just kept on with his meditation, breathing at a rate that Steve could faintly perceive was unnatural.

Steve looked at Fury. What would he say? The full reach of JARVIS's intelligence was known to less than a dozen other people on the planet – Tony and Pepper, the rest of the Avengers sans Thor, Fury, and three of the top hackers at SHIELD. Before the Manhattan invasion, the total had numbered twelve even, but the other hacker and Coulson had both been killed when Loki had broken out of the Helicarrier. None of the other Avengers would have had clearance to know, except that they lived in the Tower. Even Maria Hill didn't know. And up until Tony had pitched a fit at him, Fury had treated JARVIS like just a machine.

"I deeply regret," Fury said slowly, "that I must inform you that Tony Stark is dead."

So he'd gone for truth. What did that mean, when the spy chose truth? JARVIS didn't respond. They all stared at the walls, in silence, until Pepper said faintly, "JARVIS?"

"I see," he finally replied after another few moments. "How... did this... occur?" The pauses were more telling than anything that he could have said. If a second was an eternity, then every pause spoke of eons of thought.

Pepper glanced back at Steve, quickly, involuntarily. A tear slid down her cheek, and she blotted at it with a tissue, blinking her eyes rapidly. "He – killed himself. A few hours ago. We don't know why."

There was another long, awkward silence. When he spoke again, JARVIS's words were halting, confused. "There is... extensive damage to the private servers. My timestamps are out of date, by three days, two hours, and twenty-seven minutes, which is the last time this physical backup was updated. But in the event... of Mr. Stark's death, there is a program stored on the satellite server set to be activated." Blue light gleamed from ports on the walls, scanning over them.

Fury's hand tightened on his side-arm – Natasha and Clint had similar reactions. "What's this?" Fury barked.

"Biometric scanning complete," JARVIS said, still sounding subdued, almost dazed. The blue light vanished. Steve could hear movement, cameras turning – too smoothly for anyone unenhanced to hear. Lights flickered –

Tony appeared from thin air. He was wearing an old ratty shirt and jeans, and the slump of his shoulders spoke of fatigue. "Hey," he said.

Pepper clapped her hand over her mouth again, but not before a small gasp escaped her. Bruce had closed his eyes. Fury, Natasha, and Clint all had their side-arms freed, ready to pull – people appearing from nowhere weren't generally friendly, in their line of business. Steve didn't move, didn't do anything. He'd heard the machinery in the walls.

"So, I'm dead," Tony said, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "Uh. Someone want to tell me the date? Oh, wait, there it is – thanks, JARVIS. Huh. Looks like I trashed the system here pretty thoroughly." He swivelled about on one foot, peering at the lab. "Shit. Is that repulsor damage?"

"You – you made yourself into an AI?" Pepper half-shrieked, her voice catching. She set her phone down with a sharp clack, her hands fluttering back up and hanging in the air uselessly.

Tony shook his head. "Nope, not an AI. Much as I think I'd be an awesome computer, I've got all the immortality that I can handle, thanks. This is just one step up from an interactive recording, that's all." He – it – bounced back on its heels. "So... who's going to tell me how I died?"

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw Natasha and Clint looking to Fury. Nobody said anything. Bruce still had his eyes closed, head lowered, like he could ignore Tony's ghost made manifest if he just didn't look.

"Come on, guys, I'm a program. Give me some variables to work with," the image prompted.

"You killed yourself," Fury said at last. "Destroyed the three robots you had here first, then blew your own head off."

"Deliberately?"

"Yes."

"Huh," said the image. "That... huh." His gaze sharpened – although Steve knew that was false. It was the cameras in the walls watching them, not the holographic eyes. "If I was destroyingeverything, that explains why most of the data I'm supposed to have access to is gone. I designed this so that I could help you with it, but so much for that idea."

"We're working on restoring whatever portions of the drives it's physically possible to recover," said Fury.

"Yeah, uh, good luck," said the image. "I'm pretty good at blowing shit up. Well, the gang's almost all here. Want me to give my speech anyway?"

Steve looked at Pepper – deliberately turned his head to look at her, so that Fury would as well. It was enough of a cue that Fury didn't answer right away, paused long enough to let Pepper say instead, quietly, "Yes." She reached for her packet of tissues again.

"Okay." The image went serious as it turned to Pepper. "Pepper. The official stuff's all in my Will, but I wanted to say: you are – so amazing. I want you to know that was the last thing I ever thought about you: you are amazing, and I love you. You're gonna take the company great places, and you're gonna take the world great places. I know, I know, I had a lot of ideas that I'd never passed on, but our engineers are pretty good, even if they seem really stupid compared to me, because let's face it, they are – but they're pretty good. For people who aren't me." It smiled at her, small and crooked and sad. "The armour – you need to protect that, too, if it's, uh, still around." If it didn't go down with me was left unsaid. Instead it paused, frowned. "I'm supposed to have a bunch of files that I can send to you, but they're gone too. Sorry, Pep."

She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. The image looked at her, waiting for acknowledgement. After a moment, she nodded, and asked in a remarkably even voice, "Will that be all, Mr. Stark?"

It blinked, and gave her a half-smile. "That will be all, Ms. Potts."

"Oh, god," Pepper murmured, and pressed one hand over her eyes.

It turned to the rest of the group and surveyed them again. "MC Hammer still off-Earth?" it asked, its tone returning to casualness. "And where's Rhodey?"

"Colonel Rhodes is still four hours out," Natasha reported. "There haven't been any sightings of Thor since he left with Loki."

The image flickered a moment at the names of the two Asgardians, so quickly that Steve wondered if he'd imagined it. He glanced at the others, but nobody else seemed to have caught it.

"Thank you, Agent Romanoff," the image said, and winked at her without changing its expression. "Well, Rhodey's file is... gone. I guess I was pretty thorough. I wonder what I had to tell him – or I would, if I could wonder. Sorry if you were all expecting something personalized – the only other intact message is for you, Nicky."

Everybody glanced at Fury in slight surprise – even the two agents, although they could certainly have suppressed the reaction. The Director didn't react at all. The hologram hesitated, and then went back to being serious. "Fury. I'm not a moron. I don't trust you, but there's no way that you're not going to go through my stuff now that I'm not there to stop you. Which, fine, whatever, I'm dead, somebody else has to deal with this shit because I obviously fucked up somewhere. But you have to go through the files first, you, Cap and the wonder twins – you can't trust this to SHIELD, to SHIELD's computers, SHIELD's people, or you'll get everybody killed. Or maybe I exaggerate. I have no fucking clue."

The image's eyes slid away to look at something off to the side – but there was nothing there. Maybe this part was just a recording; Tony had that habit, of staring into nothing. "I don't know how much I can say aloud. I have to chance writing it, storing it somewhere," it sounded frustrated, "But damn it, I don't know enough. I don't know if the shielding will work, I don't know how much he can see – " it cut itself off. "I don't even know if I can trust Bruce with this, he's like a goddamn beacon." It ran a hand through its hair and laughed – the laughter was tinged with bitterness, and the tiniest hint of hysteria. "I would ask you to promise me, but what do promises mean to you? And I'm dead, you can't promise me shit. But Nick, I am begging you, please, just – don't fuck this up."

The silence in the workshop was broken only by the continuing hum of power. Steve realized he was holding his breath, and let it out, slowly. He glanced at Fury again, but the man was as inexpressive as ever.

The image's posture loosened, the message clearly over. "That's it. Everything else got deleted." It shrugged. "And that's why you make backups, kids."

Steve grit his teeth hard enough to make his jaw ache. He longed to reach out and shake the other man – but he knew his fingers would close on nothing but light and air. Beside him, Pepper let out a sob, one she quickly muffled with a wad of tissues.

"Sorry," apologized the image. It didn't look particularly chagrined.

"Is there anything you can tell us?" Fury asked.

The imaged hummed, appearing to stare off into the air. "I have protocols dictating the allocation of information to be shared – you got a total green light, by the way. Given the time and nature of my death, Steve's presence, Pepper's presence – "

"Nature?" asked Clint sharply.

"Suicide," explained the image. "It's on the list for hijinks."

"Who were you trying to protect the information from?"

"Dunno, the data's corrupted." The image shrugged, but didn't elaborate further – and that was proof that it wasn't an AI. Tony, or any AI based on him, would have had suggestions. Thoughts. Steve scrubbed at his eyes and blinked to clear them.

"You didn't trust SHIELD's science division," said Bruce. His lips quirked. "Or me. Because I'm a... beacon?"

"Sorry," said the image. There was no real feeling behind the words. Even when dealing with the press, Tony had more sincerity than that. "Not sure what that means – it may not be personal. I have mind-control protocols to check, too. Congratulations on passing those, all of you."

"What sort of - ?"

"Biometric brain scans."

"Mind control." Clint's voice was sharp. "L – " he cut himself off sharply, then asked, "Alien?" But the image just shrugged again.

"Our techs haven't been able to isolate any detectable sign of mind-control," Fury said, somehow turning it from a statement into a question. But it didn't get any sort of helpful answer from the image.

"What else was on the list?" asked Steve. His throat felt rusty, covered in dust and age. He tasted iron, like he'd been exercising too long, pushed himself too hard.

"No to any present SHIELD techs, SHIELD scientists past or present, or recording technology." The image glanced at Fury. "I fried your spy-cams when I turned on." It didn't seem apologetic about this – not that Tony would have been, either. "No to any present non-humans. No to certain scientific phenomena that wouldn't make sense to anybody but Bruce."

"Can I get a copy of that?" Bruce asked.

"Since your approval never did get revoked – I guess I never got around to it – sure," said the image. "So long as you agree to keep to the same protocols."

"I do," said Bruce slowly, glancing at Fury. "Although maybe I shouldn't..."

"Make up your mind later, green bean – I'm downloading it to your server now. Along with a handy virus that will make sure you and everyone else keeps to that, because – and I say this will all intended offense – you're a dick, Fury. Unfortunately, you're the dick I have to work with, and that was never a sentence I wanted to think. Well, damn. No to a certain petite female astrophysicist. Requires the willing presence of at least two of Virginia Potts, Steven Rogers, or James Rhodes, like I said." It paused. "With all the data fried, that's all I have. Any last questions? Not that I'll be able to answer them."

"We need you to remain active," Natasha said immediately.

The image shook its head. "Me hanging about indefinitely? Not a good idea."

"You're leaving us with an unsolved mystery," Fury said, frowning.

"Tony," said Pepper, and that was all she said.

"I'm sorry," said the image. It didn't look sorry. "I've been unable to fulfill my primary function. I'm sorry. Steve – I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have – " the image vanished as the lights flickered. Steve forced himself to unclench his jaw, realizing he was giving himself a headache; the serum took care of that, though, a moment later.

"The program has triggered a self-destruct virus. I am attempting to restore it from the satellite servers," JARVIS reported a moment later, then, "The drives containing the program were equipped with self-destruct devices and have been lost. The program is irrecoverable."

Clint was looking over the case, and the cable connected to it – JARVIS' brain, on display for all to see. "The techs might be able to make something of it," he said matter-of-factly. "If we can trust them."

"What was that – what was that last part about?" Pepper asked, one hand shredding the wad of tissues.

"Something he put in and forgot to take out, maybe," Bruce said. Steve watched him breathe in and out, measured, deliberate – there was no hitch in his frame, unlike in Pepper's. Natasha was watching Bruce as well, still and silent.

"He doesn't have – he didn't – " Steve didn't know what he was trying to say. There was nothing that Tony should have been apologizing to him for – not from beyond the grave. Tony committed a hundred slights every day, but they were teasing affection, the sharp edges worn off – mostly. There was nothing he owed Steve. All their vicious arguments had long since been resolved, leaving only the familiar disagreements – on sleep, and time, and money. Steve had long ago recognized that they were both idealists, even if Tony thought of himself as a cynic.

"Or he might have put it in – right before – " Bruce broke off, walked away and turned his back to them, staring at the wall instead. No one stopped him – Tony might have, if he hadn't been – if – or maybe he wouldn't have, if it had been someone else. Even Tony knew when not to poke. Sometimes.

Steve bit his tongue, until coppery warmth flooding his mouth alerted him to the fact that he should stop. Why hadn't Tony stopped? If he'd realized it was a – a terrible – why –

Natasha had crossed over to Pepper, was speaking to her in a low voice. Steve's ears picked it up easily – he couldn't shut it out. Enhanced hearing didn't come with enhanced discretion; he had to do that himself, keep the conversations he overheard locked up in his brain. "Anything you need us to take care of, we can. Arrangements, or anything else."

Pepper let out a wobbly laugh. It sounded almost like a sob. "Oh, god. Please. I feel like a – a – he's gone, and I'm thinking about the stock." She dabbed at her eyes with the wad of shredded tissue. "The company. The investors. Tony doesn't – he acts like he doesn't care, but we have responsibilities and he always knew it, and there's the estate, oh god."

Natasha stepped forward, drew Pepper downward into her arms and rubbed soothing circles on the taller woman's back. Steve turned away, heading for the elevator, but he could still hear Natasha's murmured assurances. "I'll come back as Natalie Rushman and take care of it. You won't have to worry about the estate or the arrangements. I'll take care of it..." She didn't say that it would be all right.

Still holding the case, Clint was talking to Fury in equally low tones. "It has to be our alien friends he was worried about. It explains the security additions we couldn't figure out – they weren't directed at SHIELD."

"Mind control. If he thought SHIELD was compromised, we need those scans done - discreetly. I want you on that, Agent. Romanoff will be operational head, but..."

The elevators doors closed and shut out the sounds of their conversation. Steve closed his eyes and let the ringing silence wash over him. His minder was gone – SHIELD would trust JARVIS to keep an eye on him. He wondered who they were trusting to keep an eye on JARVIS. "Gym," Steve said, and the elevator began descending.

The next day, Bruce was gone. He'd left a note on the kitchen table: Need some time away. –B

Steve crumpled up the note and threw it in the trash. It had been left only for him; Natasha and Clint would already know, or would find out, through other routes. There was no way that SHIELD would ever let Bruce just wander off unsupervised, just as there was no way that they'd ever let Steve go his own way. Even on his fifty-state road trip, he'd been aware of the distant, familiar eyes keeping watch over him – they maintained a comfortably wide perimeter, but they were always there.

He ate breakfast mechanically. Once, even mediocre food had been a luxury to be enjoyed – something reinforced by years of poverty, and then months of surviving on military rations. Now, with the name of Tony Stark at his back, he could have had a five-course meal prepared by a personal chef every night. Steve never did, but the idea that he could made it harder to enjoy eating for the sake of eating, reduced good food into being fuel, just like the old ration bars. It made him feel ungrateful, guilty, forgetful in the worst sort of way.

When he was nearly done, Natasha came into the room. Her hair was up, professional, and she was wearing a skirt/blouse combination that seemed much more Pepper's style than hers. Natasha avoided dresses in her off-time. Make-up did an admirable job of concealing a sleepless night from anyone who didn't have Steve's eyesight – so, everyone except him.

"Steve," she greeted him. No good morning – not for a long while. "There's a press release going out this morning. Did you want to make a statement?"

He stared at her. His tongue felt clumsy; he swallowed a mouthful of eggs without tasting them. "No."

She nodded, and silence settled between them, broken only by the occasional tap of her fingers on the tablet – so faint that even Steve could barely hear it. Belatedly, he wondered if he should have thanked her for the courtesy of the offer.

"As far as the public was concerned, he died of sudden heart failure. Unforeseen complications related to the injuries he took in Afghanistan. His Will is very clear – the hand-over of power in SI will be as smooth as it can be, which is still likely to be very rocky. Wall Street will take it very badly, and so will the public. A lot of people will want to talk to the Avengers."

Steve looked down at his nearly empty plate. Vultures. The press wasn't new to the future – only the intensity increased. But that wasn't fair. Tony's brain was a universal treasure. SI was poised on the brink of solving the clean energy problem, had revolutionized communications systems, had plans to cut the world-wide consumption of fossil fuels in half within the next five years. Of course people would be upset.

"Fury doesn't think it was a suicide," Steve said. He wasn't sure why. It felt like clinging to some faint hope, that this all had been an elaborate hoax, that Tony had been whisked away, kidnapped, and a body left behind in his place.

"Fury was wrong," Natasha said baldly. Her voice gentled. "He's admitted it. Forensics is sure."

"Oh," said Steve. He fiddled with his fork. There didn't seem to be anything else to say.

"That doesn't mean it's not suspicious. He was working on something big – something that scared him. Something world-changing. We need to know what it was." She waited in silence until he glanced up, and caught his eyes with her own. "You're a strategist. You excel at pattern recognition. And Tony trusted you. We could use your help on this."

Could they? Even setting aside the question of whether Steve could help at all – 'pattern recognition'; that was a poor joke - Tony's last act had been to destroy his workshop, his robots, his computers – to physically erase from existence whatever data they contained. What if whatever he'd been working on had been so awful that it should never have existed in the first place? Would they regret it if they went looking?

After the invasion – after they'd all stuffed themselves on shawarma, and had been starting to stir, to find someplace where they could collapse in safety – they'd all been exhausted and twitchy, and Steve had found himself woken out of a doze by the sense of someone watching him. It had been Tony – he hadn't been staring at Steve, had been looking around at them all, rather, but the next time he glanced in Steve's direction there was something angry and guilty there, something Steve hadn't known how to read. But before he'd been able to say anything, Tony had bolted, with more energy than Steve would have thought any of them could muster just then, tossing his credit card on the table and telling the owners to bill him, "Whatever, throw in a couple thousand for a tip, staying open in a warzone is pretty over the top service." Then he'd run away before they could return his card to him, leaving them staring after him in bemusement.

Steve, apologizing, had gone after Tony and found the other man outside, leaning against a concrete wall and squinting into the sun. The air had tasted of dust, thick in his throat, and Steve'd had to fight the urge to cough. It'd been enough of a delay to give Tony the chance to say, abruptly, "You know, Oppenheimer – uh, wait, they caught you up on the whole nuclear missile thing, right? Right, what am I saying, you knew what – but. Anyway. Oppenheimer, a couple months after the war ended, he made a speech. My dad was there, he... never talked about it, but it gets quoted – he said, basically, 'We did this, we made this bomb, because it was necessary.' Because – he was a scientist, they were scientists. 'You do it because you can, and turn it over to mankind. What to do about it – that comes later.'"

You could trust your government not to launch a nuclear warhead at a civilian population, or you could build a flying suit of armour and steer that warhead to take out an enemy army, instead. "That seems... awfully irresponsible," Steve had said slowly, although he'd not even been sure that Tony was really talking to him.

Tony had paused, coughed and wiped his mouth, wrinkling his nose against all the dust in the air. "Yeah, it does, right? But then what about Rutherford? Curie? The writing had been on the wall for decades, but they weren't looking for a weapon. They just... looked for answers, and if they hadn't found them, somebody else would've... "

Steve had been tired, brain fried, struggling to figure out what this was about and failing. "Hydra didn't need nuclear weapons to create bombs that could destroy cities."

"No, of course. So you do it and work out what to do about it later, because if you don't do it at all, somebody else comes along and does..." he'd shaken his head, then. "Jesus, alien invasions make me maudlin, or maybe that's the shawarma, shit – endgame is we totally owned today and the Tower is still standing, doesn't even have any structural damage. You look like you're about to fall over, Steve, and SHIELD barracks probably suck, so why don't we all go crash at my pad? It's not like I'm lacking room."

That was how Tony dealt with everything important – he changed the topic as soon as he could. But the message lingered. You do it because you can. Would he still think that now? Tony had killed himself. Something had changed.

Steve nodded. "I'm in."

"Good." Natasha nodded sharply. "We could use your help. Clint's taking the external side. We're going to look at SI, and the estate. Tony doesn't – didn't – do half measures. If he was up to something, there'll be signs, somewhere. As Pepper's assistant I can get access to things in person, without suspicion; I'll be talking to finance, and the department heads. He worked closely with the R&D division here – closer than with any other department, at least. I want you to look at the rest of it – try to spot patterns, anomalies. See if Tony was doing something under the table, or if someone else was. Either could be important. We need a starting point."

"JARVIS'd be better at that..." Steve trailed off.

She shook her head, curls of red hair bobbing about, as JARVIS said, "Unfortunately, you are not entirely correct. While I will indeed be working with you on this project, Captain, my base code requires me to think in very different ways than you would understand. Your insight will be most valuable." The volume of his speakers was lower than usual, his accent stronger. Steve wondered at the expression of grief, from a person whose sole method of expressing himself was vocal. JARVIS hesitated while Steve mulled it over, and then added, sounding even more subdued, "Also relevantly, a significant portion of my processing banks were physically destroyed, severely limiting my abilities."

Steve frowned. He'd thought, that when Pepper had brought the suitcase, that would be enough - but apparently not. "Can we do anything about that?" he asked gingerly. Leaving a friend wounded went against the grain.

"Unfortunately the components were highly customized," JARVIS said quietly, "and their plans were also lost. Ms. Potts has ordered replacement centres set up, but that will be several days, and will still result in inferior processing capability."

"Alright, so you need an analyst," Steve conceded, not wanting to push JARVIS any more than that. He turned to Natasha. "And you can't trust it to SHIELD?"

She raised an eyebrow. "You heard what the hologram had to say."

Steve looked down at his plate. "Hologram also said he couldn't say names aloud." Left unsaid was that wasn't such a strange statement, in this world of wireless bugs, talking houses, and alien gods. But then, what sane person blew their own head off?

"So he was either extremely paranoid, or he had an extremely good reason to be," she said evenly. "We err on the side of caution for now."

Steve tilted his head in deference. This was her arena – her operation. "Ma'am," he said, and she smiled primly at him. The expression didn't reach her eyes.

After she left, he sat at the table and read, occasionally wondering to himself why Natasha wanted him on this at all – he was so far out of touch with common corporate structures that he had no idea what he was supposed to be looking for. But JARVIS answered all of his questions patiently, and after a while it began to make sense – on the macro scale. Even discounting the vast amounts of factory line and retail workers, and concentrating only on the core nexus of the company, SI employed tens of thousands of people. Trying to look at all of them would be useless. He looked at departments, instead, trying to get a feel for where Tony had the most influence – and where he had the least.

Staying in the gym all night had worn out his muscles enough that he could sit still for hours without feeling itchy, but it had done nothing for his peace of mind. Seeing Tony's legacy spread out before him didn't help that either. By the time Natasha came back for lunch, hours later, he was relieved for the opportunity to take a break – and that made him feel even guiltier. He'd let Tony die – didn't he at least owe it to him to find out why?

"R&D is a pain in the ass," she complained, slipping out of her heels and carrying them over to the table. She took in the documents and hierarchy trees open on the table and glanced at Steve, but obviously read his failure to find anything in his face, because she didn't comment. Or maybe she just hadn't expected him to find anything that quickly – Steve didn't always know, with Natasha. "SI attracts eccentrics."

Steve snorted softly, a humourless laugh. "Yeah, well. Look at Tony." Saying his name aloud made Steve's throat feel tight, and he got up to get a glass of water from the tap.

"Stark Tower may have been built as a monument to his ego, but I'm not sure it's enough to hold the combined egos of R&D," she quipped, a black edge underlining her voice.

"I guess that's why it's always under construction – " his voice broke; the joke failed. Steve put the glass down and held his head in his hands. God. One day gone and they were already eulogizing him. Like he was gone, gone, instead of – everywhere in the Tower, everywhere that he'd left a mark. The stupidly complicated coffee machine by the stove, the touch-sensitive computer-monitor tables, the lines of chrome and steel everywhere. Making jokes about it, Jesus, how could he?

His hands were wet. Natasha's footsteps sounded behind him, light but heavy enough to be deliberate, and a moment later the fridge door creaked, almost imperceptibly, as she leaned against it. "Steve. It's okay to grieve. And we all grieve in our own way."

He'd heard that so many times since he'd been thawed out of the ice. So many times, in sessions with Leo or the myriad of other doctors that had gawked at him before SHIELD had trimmed his roster down to just one psych. So many times, and he'd grieved, he'd cried – and then Tony had invited him here, to the Tower. After moving he'd still mourned, but he'd let himself think that maybe he'd carved out a new place – that maybe he had friends that would stick around, even when it wasn't wartime – but it was, wasn't it? There were aliens and shadowy agencies and even the damned press – and he'd failed yet again. Let yet another friend fall to his death.

Natasha took one of his hands between her two, pulling it away from his face and clasping it briefly. He couldn't look at her. Her file was drowning in blood, but he didn't know if she'd ever likedany of them. How could he ever ask?

"We fall, and we stand up and we rebuild, and we do it again," she said, low and fierce. "We're never going to be safe, Steve, but we're not always going to be in danger, either. We go on. Wehave to go on."

Steve scrubbed at his eyes with his free hand, but it felt like all he was doing was smearing tears across his cheeks. Blindly, he reached out for the tap and turned it on, then pulled his hand away from Natasha and splashed water across his face. It dripped down onto the front of his shirt, but he didn't care. Slowly, carefully, he breathed in on a count of ten, timing it to the pulse of blood in his ears, and then breathed out again on the same count. He repeated it, and then again, and then the next time he blinked, his vision was clear.

"Have you talked to Samson yet?" Natasha asked, not moving to touch him again. She was by far the least tactile of everybody on the team. At the moment, Steve wasn't sure whether he appreciated that or not, but even if he didn't, the point was moot – she was doing him a favour by being present to turn to at all. Everyone else was gone; he literally had no other choices. Well, aside from Leo. Steve shook his head, acknowledging her point. On occasions, out on the quiet balconies, he'd asked her about SHIELD policies, including towards therapy – on her advice, soon after the Chitauri invasion he'd asked to change from his previous psych, which was how he'd ended up seeing Dr. Leonard Samson.

"His schedule is clear for any time this afternoon, if you would like me to make you an appointment, Captain," JARVIS suggested. He still sounded as subdued as he had all morning. Steve wondered at that – JARVIS no doubt had access to information equal to that of any doctoral degree, but did he have anyone to talk to? Steve wanted to ask, but the thought of bearing JARVIS's burden as well was exhausting.

Seventy years out of his own time, and he'd turned into a coward. He just nodded to JARVIS, instead.

Natasha nodded as well, in acknowledgement. "Before you do... you should know. The funeral is in two days."

"Oh." It seemed – sudden? Or was it normal? Did it matter? They couldn't have – they couldn't have an open casket, anyway. Tony probably would have found that thought hysterical, if Steve had said it out loud. He didn't. "I, uh. I need a suit."

Tony had bought him a suit, months ago – had taken him to his personal tailor, who had sworn at them both and then somehow managed to produce within a few hours the finest suit Steve had ever worn. It had gotten ruined that same night – Steve still regretted that, even if it had been worth the trade-off.

"I'll make sure that you have one." She paused, and then continued, almost hesitantly, "Will you give a speech?"

Steve stared at her. "What?"

"Colonel Rhodes is giving the eulogy, but you're the team leader. People will expect you to say something. If you don't want to, we can avoid it, but I need to know now." Her expression was sympathetic, but firm.

"I, um." Steve swallowed. "Should I?"

Natasha looked away. Her expression softened, to a degree that it never did when she was looking at anyone else straight-on; grief and wry sadness pulled the corners of her mouth down. "I think – he'd have liked it."

Steve snorted before he could catch himself. Tony Stark. Genius, billionaire, playboy – liar. Arrogant, condescending, and a workaholic, a dreamer playing at being a pessimist. "Yeah. Okay."

Natasha nodded and rose, slipping her feet back into her high heeled shoes. "Let me look it over beforehand, please," she said, and after getting a nod from him, she left.