AN: Ahahaha because it needed to be done, and the Noragami fandom needs more crossover love and my brain comes up with the weirdest crossovers when under stress. This plot bunny was spawned in the middle of an in-class essay on Milton.
Not sure how my thought processes work. Meh.
The timeline is post-Avengers, but pre-Everything else afterward. That means no Thor 2 or Winter Soldier guys, and the entire team moves into the Avengers Tower.
Warning! Warning! Warning! Unbeta'd!
If there's anyone out there who's willing, please please please PM me!
Summary: SHIELD should really have taught Steve how to properly lock his phone screen. One mistaken phone call in the middle of battle ends up with a Delivery God and his Regalia in the fray. Fortunately, they were just what the doctor ordered. "Damn it! You gotta start charging more than five yen per job!" One-shot.
Steve Rogers, as a man frozen in time, tended to be very bad with modern telecommunication devices. Or, in less elaborate language, Captain America sucked with phones.
Granted, it's not his fault. He went under the ice long before portable cellphones the size of bricks were a thing, and now in this new era dominated by touchscreens and a bazillion "applications" he couldn't make heads or tails of, Steve was basically left to flounder on his own with the standard-issue SHIELD phone. The thing was like a "smartphone" like the ones that he saw kids carrying around everywhere these days but with more confusing controls and functions. Sure, the agent that gave him the phone said that it was "easy to use", "very intuitive", and had given him a crash course on the basics, but half the time Steve ended up accidentally calling people at the most inopportune moments.
After he moved in with the others at the Avengers Tower, things got even worse because he didn't have anyone to ask.
Natasha and Clint were both usually out on clandestine SHIELD missions.
It was absolutely useless to ask Thor as he was still going wide-eyed at the Midgardian device called a "toaster".
Pepper was usually willing to help but was too busy running Stark Enterprises to do so.
Bruce was also happy to help but was not much better at it that Steve was, because while he could fine-tune a gamma ray scope to detect Tesseract radiation the scientist was helpless before a phone.
And there was no way whatsoever that Steve would ask Tony, because the billionaire who built his empire on technology had a sort of deep seated impression that everyone should be as proficient at manipulating technology as he is, and anyone that couldn't (which was mostly everyone in the world) was dumber than a rock. Steve didn't think his dignity could take it if he asked Tony for tech help.
In the end, Steve was still unable to use the damn thing with any amount of confidence.
Perhaps someone should have taught him how to lock his phone screen properly.
It was a fine Saturday afternoon in New York. The sun was shining, the car horns were honking, and the normal giant monsters the size of buildings were attacking.
Think that through carefully. One of those things was not like the others.
"New York. Again. Why is it always New York?!" Tony said as he blasted one of the giant insect things. The monster, which looked like a moth with too many eyeballs and weird neon colours, didn't go down but instead continued on its trail of property destruction, flipping over three vans, eight cars, and a hot dog cart. The smells of gasoline and wieners were in the air.
The car-sized hole in the moth quickly frothed over with dark goo and regenerated into a giant eyeball. Creepy. And a pain in the ass because the things just. Won't. Die!
Natasha landed deftly on the roof right under Tony was she flicked one of her knives, and then threw it away in disgust. "Be careful, Tony. Their blood is caustic. Don't get any of it on you. And giant monsters always attack New York because this city has a habit of attracting the most fantastic and insane people and ludicrous events."
Clint snickered from a nearby rooftop as he loosed an explosive arrow at something that looked like a mutated crab. "Seeing as you built the Tower in New York, Stark, you probably see its appeal too. I mean, Godzilla and King Kong both love it here; why shouldn't other giant creepy crawlies? Misfits are all attracted to this place anyways." Also nearby, the Hulk smashed into a spider thing and pinned it against a building, whacking it repeatedly with his fists.
"HULK SMASH SPIDER!"
The thing wiggled and struggled, and Tony had an irrational urge to smash it into a smear on the ground with a proportionately large rolled-up newspaper.
He pushed away the image to fire another blast at the moth thing. This was not a good time to be distracted!
The familiar sound of thunder boomed overhead, and Thor gave a mighty whack to a scorpion thing. "Friends! There are more of these beasts springing from the east!" The hammer, fortunately, did some damage and the scorpion thing stayed down. Good.
"Let's head , has anyone seen Steve?"
Steve, at this moment, was cursing the very large slug embedded with eyeballs that was pushing against his shield.
And then, unbelievably, the sound of the dial tone started ringing from his pocket. As he was fending off the giant slug thing embedded with eyeballs. That stupid piece of...
Someone picked up on the other end, and the infernal device was on speakerphone. For a moment, the slug intensified its efforts to crush him, and he missed the first part of the greeting. "-ast, affordable, and reliable! Delivery God Yato at your service! What's your request?"
Steve blurted out the first thing on his mind. "Some help with this giant monster would be nice!"
"Alright! Coming right up! Oi Yukine! We got a job! Let's go!"
Steve only had time to say "What in the..." before two kids in civilian clothes materialized out of nowhere.
"Whoa! Looks like you do have a problem." The taller teenager, wearing a dark jersey and ragged bandanna, said as he smirked at the slug, his icy blue eyes glinting. The other kid with orange-tinted eyes and blond hair wearing a khaki jacket only sighed as he muttered, "I was about to eat that really yummy onigiri too..."
The slug's assault on his shield lessened, and it talked in a distorted, very disturbing voice. "Smells...good...smells...go...od." With a surging movement, the slug barreled toward the two civilians, and the change in direction was so abrupt that Steve had no time to react.
The dark-haired teen's smirk only grew wider. He outstretched his hand towards the blond teen, a steeliness in his movements, like a command.
"Come, Sekki!"
The blond (Sekki?) seemed to become made of white light, and his form elongated and leaped to the icy-eyed teen's hand. The light dispersed, and in his hand was a blade. It caught the sunlight and refracted it, but it almost seemed brighter than it should be, like it was glowing with an inner light. It had no hilt; a swath of long bandage was wrapped around where the teen was holding it.
With amazing, definitely inhuman reflexes, he lunged forward and sliced the giant slug in half.
The thing roared, and then dissolved into spidery wisps of text that quickly dispersed into the air.
Steve just gaped at the teen, who gave him a thumbs-up.
"As I said before, I'm Delivery God Yato! Fast, affordable, and reliable! Now, may I have my payment for this job?"
"Um...well, if you put it that way...your job's not over. There are... Well, more of them all over New York." He said dumbly. It's not everyday you had a sword-wielding teen materialize out of nowhere and save you a lot of trouble killing a giant slug.
Yato only sighed. "A god's work never ends, alright."
The sword in his hand glinted and radiated a sense of exasperation. If swords had mouths and could talk, it (he?) would have said something like, "Damn it! You gotta start charging more than five yen per job!"
"These things just won't stop coming! I'm running out of arrows!" Clint shouted to the rest of them as he fired another at a flying manta ray. With eyeballs embedded. Was this a thing now?
"These things just regenerate. Only Thor's hammer is doing any real damage, though as demonstrated by Hulk..."Natasha paused to fire her gun at an eyeball, "...ripping them physically to pieces works as well. Damn it, where is Steve?"
"Wherever he is, he's sure taking his time getting here! Someone, please kill these off! God damn these things!" Tony roared.
"...that can be AAARRRAAAAANNNGGGEEEEDDDD!"
Suddenly a kid who jumped out of nowhere, did a backflip, and neatly stabbed the manta ray Clint was shooting at. The thing just sorta dispersed into weird lines of spidery text.
...Fuck this. It was Saturday. It should have been his private time in the lab, but noooo, giant monsters invade New York again and he just wasted the better part of five hours blasting monsters that regenerated and now this random kid in a jersey shows up and stabs one of them and it's dead. How is this his life?
Steve then ran up to them, looking none to worse for wear. He had the face of a man who had seen the truly inexplicable, and in the job of a superhero, that's almost impossible, considering the weird shit that they had to deal with on a regular basis.
Natasha just stared at him. "Do you have any explanation for what we just saw?"
Steve looked at her and swallowed. "N-no. He calls himself Yato, and his sword is another kid called Sekki, I think. I accidentally called them on my phone while I was trying not to get killed by a giant slug, and then they materialized out of nowhere and killed it for me."
Clint also stared hard at the super soldier. "Cap, if I didn't just see that kid take out a manta ray in three seconds that took three of my explosive arrows just to slow down, I would never have believed you. But, seeing as how said kid is now currently slicing up all sorts of eyeball things over there, I gotta believe you. I'm going to need a drink or twenty after this."
"...I'm so FUCKING DONE WITH THIS!" was all Tony said.
Thor was still too busy smacking monsters with the Hulk to comment much on the strange development of events.
It took them another two hours, but with at last the city was completely cleared of eyeball monsters.
And now Thor and Yato were having an epic staredown.
The kid-who-was-also-a-sword just looked incredibly bored.
"...Asgardian." Yato said, his ice-blue eyes neutral. His arms were crossed, and he stood like an equal to the God of Thunder. That was impressive, considering that the Asgardian was a full two and a half heads taller than him.
"...Denizen of the Far Shore." Thor was also impassive, his face blank. His hammer was by his side, not raised, but not completely relaxed either.
"Guys? Do you mind telling us what is going on?" Bruce said while trying to salvage his pants.
The blond kid just shrugged when they all looked at him. "Don't look at me, I know nothing about this either."
"Your presence explains why the ayakashi have become so powerful as to manifest into the material world. Your energy has ripped a hole in the barrier between the Near Shore and the Far Shore. See to it that you repair it." Yato suddenly did not look all that young anymore. His eyes were considerably older than the rest of him.
Natasha stared at the immortal (she's sure of it, with the aura the...being cloaks himself with).
Ayakashi...evil spirits.
Thor nodded with dignity. "I shall see to it, God of the Land of the Rising Sun."
Yato nodded back, eyes serious.
Then, he held his hand and made the universal gesture of "pay up" towards Steve. "Yeah, I really need a break. So please, pay up. I charge for my services, you know. It ain't cheap, making a living these days."
Tentatively, Steve asked, "How...how much do I owe you?"
With that, Yato froze a bit, and then turned to confer with Sekki.
"Yukine! Do you know what the American dollar to yen exchange rate is?"
"How should I know?!"
"Well, you just move the decimal place twice, then..."
After a few minutes of this Yato turned to them. He raised five fingers.
"Due to the foreign exchange rate, your offering would come to a total of five cents!"
"...huh?" Was the general response of the Avengers.
With a sort of numbness to reality, Steve handed over a hundred-dollar bill. "I don't have a nickel on me, so keep the change?"
With a whoop, Yato took the bill, and then suddenly disappeared into nothing, along with Yukine or Sekki.
"...god damn it, I need a drink." Clint repeated.
If Steve could have drowned his bewilderment in alcohol like he knew Clint and Tony were once they got back to the Tower, he would have joined them.
And then there was that time with the mission in Japan for the Avengers, where they met a god(dess?) of war with a bone to pick with Yato, but that's a story for another time...
AN: Finally done!
If any of you guys are wondering, the reason why Thor could hurt the ayakashi and have it stick was because his hammer is of divine origin, and has a certain sentience. It's not as good for exorcising ayakashi like a Regalia, but at least it can mete out serious damage and eventually kill them.
I'm not sure if I have enough inspiration to write a sequel or the time, either. I'll see how it goes.
Begging for a beta reader! Please. HELP.
Drop the starving author a review?
October 02,2014 : Minor edits to spelling and grammar.