"Chapter 2"

When Steve woke up nothing hurt but he was struck by the thought that something should. Remembered pain, hidden in his muscles and locked away deep in his mind so that for a long moment he simply felt himself breathe fresh air and wondered how he had woken up at all. And that was when he realized what it was that was missing: the should.

Water everywhere, pressing on every side.

Drowning.

The pain, the terror—it all came crashing in at once and his eyes snapped open to find himself in a hospital room. Alone. There were no machines, nothing hooked up to his body or measuring out vitals, but without the steady beeping of said machines the panic that was threatening to choke him wasn't grounded.

Alone.

Where was his team?

There had been times, before the serum, when he had sometimes felt detached from his own boy. During a bout of illness he had looked down idly at his own bony arm lying so still against the blanket and he simply hadn't felt it. His arm had not felt connected to his body despite it being right there and he'd wondered if he would be able to move it at all. He never panicked in those moments (of which there were surprisingly several over the years), perhaps too tired to be, but the outcome was always the same: he would stare at that strange, absent-feeling arm for several seconds and wondering at the detachment he felt before he would grow bored of the game he'd allowed himself to play. He'd move his arm just like that, and the spell would be broken, and he would wonder at the power of the human mind.

He felt suddenly like that now—detached—but this time he couldn't snap himself out of the spell.

"Cap?"

Clint. Thank god. Steve didn't think he'd ever been so happy to hear someone's voice since finding Bucky in Zola's lab. With a short shuddering gasp he felt the phantom paralysis shatter and he could move again.

"Whoa! Cap—Steve, hey, it's okay. It's okay." Clint's voice was close now, lilting slightly in concern that would be nonetheless entirely absent from his face. Steve felt one of the archer's strong hands grip his arm, right above the wrist. The feeling of skin on skin was an electric shock, further waking Steve up from his fear, and he struggled to swallow past a dry throat. The ice was still a hovering memory, as was the awful suffocation of drowning, and he was dangerously close to losing control all over again.

"Breathe, Cap. C'mon, calm down." Clint was still with him; the archer wasn't about to lose him. His voice, so firm and steady, was exactly what Steve needed. "Deep breath. C'mon, deep breath."

Deep breath in.

Let it out.

Deep breath in.

Let it out.

After the inhale on the second breath his brain remembered that this was the way through pain, whether it was from a severe coughing fit from pneumonia or the throbbing pain of a beating in a back alley in Brooklyn (or watching a best friend plummet to his death hundreds of feet down from a broken train door). Releasing that second breath was steadier and deeper than the first, as was the third and fourth that followed.

"'m okay," he rasped out, wincing at the scratchy sandpaper of his voice. He needed a drink.

Clint saw that and he moved away from the bed to grab a glass already sitting full on the side table. "Figures you would wake up when we weren't here." He handed Steve the glass and sat down in a chair, answering Steve's questioning look. "You've been out for about twelve hours. We've been taking shifts but Fury called us in for a debriefing, something about a last-minute intel about the battle, and so we've only just out."

Leave it to Clint to put it like they'd escaped jail. Steve allowed himself to grin just a bit, more focused on what the archer had just told him. Twelve hours. It wasn't unusual for all of the team to crash and crash hard after a battle. Clint and Natasha because of their very normal human bodies, Steve because of the super soldier serum burning through his system at a hyperactive rate; and then Bruce, whose transformations to and from the Hulk wore a heavy tax on his body. It was usually the doctor who slept the longest and depending on the severity of the fight was while the Hulk was also the one who took longest to recover. Steve had wondered why a man barely in his forties would look so haggard and aged, but now he knew. The longest Steve himself had slept following a battle was eighteen hours, so twelve wasn't so concerning.

"How's the team?"

Clint didn't comment on the clear question and Steve's evident disregard of his own personal safety or wellbeing, even though the flat expression in his eyes told the super soldier that he would like to say something about it anyway. "All okay. Nat was scraped up by a falling ledge after Thor fried all those bugs but it was nothing too serious. Bruce's transformation wasn't too serious. Mostly he's been looking after you." The archer was quiet for a moment. "We all have."

It was exceedingly rare for Clint to be so transparent, so open. Master assassins simply didn't do emotions. Steve's lungs throbbed with remembered struggle for air and he was suddenly afraid to find out just how bad his drowning had been.

Clint read his expression again and smiled in a small, sharp way. Oh yes, Steve realized, he really didn't want to know the details. "You were dead for almost eight minutes. Heart stopped. Tony found you ten feet below the surface. He's going to kick your ass, by the way, Cap, so be ready."

"When has Tony ever not threatened that?" Steve countered wearily, looking up at the ceiling. He wanted to get up, to move; he had never been one to lay around and dwell—it used to worry his mother something fierce when he'd been young.

Then there was a tremendous crash outside the door and Clint muttered, "speak of the devil" just before Tony Stark himself sauntered into sight.

"Oh look who finally decided to wake up," he said snidely, and it was the biting edge in his voice that told both the soldier and the archer just how upset he really was. "Although if you're trying for beauty sleep it's not gonna work for you, Spangles."

Ouch. Normally Steve would've responded readily but this time he didn't. Maybe he was still too out of it (which was a complete and utter bullshit lie), or maybe it was the simple fact that he didn't want to fight about this (Steve had never been one to fight about himself, after all) but it was clear in the tense, waiting silence that a fight was exactly what Tony was looking for.

And with no response to his tauntings and insults, Tony's acid tongue covered up his concern and fear with only more of the same.

"'Just a quick mission'," he mocked, with a dark and almost savage expression, "'won't take more than a couple of hours'. Then out esteemed, respected leader lets himself go for a little swim—"

"Tony." Bruce's low, warning tone came from the doorway; the doctor came in followed by Natasha. Bruce silently cleaned his glasses on the edge of his comfortably-worn shirt, his familiar wearied expression showing that he had not yet rested—and that Tony had clearly been going at this for quite a while. Thankfully the genius billionaire listened to Bruce, even if he didn't look particularly happy about it, and moved aside to the far wall with a dark look. Natasha stopped on Clint's opposite side and offered Steve a thin smile, which only made him more nervous about the situation; if he had managed to piss off Black Widow then he must have scared them all more than he'd originally thought.

Thor chose that moment to walk through the door, the smell of electricity wafting along behind him. His long blood red cape was singed and torn but other than that and a streak of ash across his cheek he looked unharmed. He, at least, seemed pleased that Steve was awake. "How dost thou, my friend?" he asked Steve, as if it were only the two of them in the room. "You gave us all a mighty scare."

Sometimes Steve suspected that Thor only spoke such old dialect around the rest of the Avengers to amuse himself—it sure as hell was startling to hear the demigod to say 'thou'. "Been better," he admitted quietly, feeling his face heat up. He's known among the team as one of the quietest of them; once he shrugged the layer of Captain America off, Steve Rogers was quiet and unassuming, content to merely watch until he felt he needed to step in. It wasn't often he was in the spotlight like this and he hated it.

He wanted to go home.

Tony's snort from the wall was loud in the quiet. "I'd be too if I'd just died for eight minutes—"

Natasha's sharp elbow caught the billionaire directly beneath the ribs.

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Taking a shower was out the picture.

Steve only had to listen to the water running in the bathroom and he knew he couldn't face a steady stream of water hitting him in the face. It had been bad enough when he'd woken from the ice—now, with this second incident, he very nearly left the room completely. But he still wore the remnants of the battle on skin that had been covered by his suit and he could easily smell the heady water of the Hudson in his hair and for some reason it made him nauseous.

Well. It was going to have to go.

Sighing, Steve grabbed a couple washcloths and set the water going in the sink. He had taken a lot of sponge baths after he'd woken in the 21st century; he was just going to have to do the same again now.

It didn't make him completely clean but it was better than before. The Hudson was at least gone and the leftover grime wiped away, and he felt better to be in his own skin again.

"How are you, Captain Rogers?" Jarvis asked him when he finally left the bathroom. Steve was familiar enough with Tony's personable AI that he didn't startle like he had in the beginning, only offering a tired smile and a shrug.

"Fine, Jarvis. Where's the rest of the group?"

"Sir is in his lab, working on fixing his suit and Dr. Banner has set himself up in one of sir's labs on the twenty-fourth floor. Thor is not yet back. Mr. Barton and Ms. Romanov have requested I not look in on them."

Clint and Natasha were what Tony called "secret-not secret", which Steve took to mean that the two master assassins were together but weren't supposed to be discussed; he wasn't the prying type, anyway, so he never brought it up. He was surprised, however, by the sharp twist he suddenly felt in his heart, and for a moment his thoughts flickered to Peggy.

But then he shook himself and thanked Jarvis for the information before heading on his way.

It was time, he supposed, to face the group and find out how the battle had went.

It wasn't going to be fun.

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A/N: Jeez, it's been almost a month since I posted the first chapter. RL got in the way. Third (and final) chapter should be up within the next couple of weeks.

Thank you for the all the feedback and favorites so far!