ladyshadowdrake | Aug. 13th, 2017

Aug. 13th, 2017

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You know I like the tentacles. ;)

Thank you, I’ll look it over!
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I know I was taking a little break to avoid all the stress of the Charlottesville rally being talked about on tumblr, but I also wanted to make sure all of my Jewish mutuals know how loved they are. I know this is scary and sometimes it feels like the only people looking out for us is ourselves, but know that you are not alone and have never been alone. We are one mishpacha, one family, and we will look after each other and keep each other safe like we always have. I love each and every one of you. Remember, the whole world is a very narrow bridge and the main thing is to have no fear at all.

Goyim, please reblog this instead of all the performative “punch a nazi” nonsense. Make your Jewish followers feel safe.
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Let’s go together.
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List of fav Steve/Tony fics

List of fav Steve/Tony fics where Steve doesn’t know Tony is Iron Man

List of fav Rhodey/Tony fics

comics reclists

Important issues to read in Iron Man v.1 (part 1)

Important issues to read in Iron Man v.1 (part 2)

Important issues to read in Iron Man v.1 (part 3)

Important issues to read in Avengers (part 1: #1-151) with Steve/Tony moments

Important issues to read in Avengers (part 2: #152-221) with Steve/Tony moments

616 comic related stuff: TONY STARK

Ladies of Iron Man comics (from volume 1 to the present), ongoing + masterpost

Timetable of Tony’s dating life

Tony’s AI chronology

Evolution of Tony’s company (from SI)

Important issues to read in Iron Man v.1 (part 1)

Important issues to read in iron Man v.1 (part 2)

Important issues to read in iron Man v.1 (part 3. end)

Iron Man v3 dreamcast (Rumiko, Sunset, Tiberius)

Tony random things I found in comics part 1

Tony random things I found in comics part 2

Buying Iron Man trades

616 comic related stuff: JAMES RHODES

Rhodey random things I found out in his comics part 1

616 comic related stuff: STEVE ROGERS

Ladies of Captain America comics (from v1 to the present), ongoing + masterpost

Timetable of Steve’s dating life (soon)

For the Anon who was looking for comics info and recs
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I can’t even.

[Marvel Adventures: Avengers #38.]

The Hulk at a petting zoo. Too freakin funny. LOL

The Hulk once set free a huge lab full of animals being held for cosmetic testing, and not a single fuck was given. You go, Hulk. You go.

Once, to get Hulk to calm down and turn back in Banner, Shield deployed a crate full of puppies

I don’t think that horse likes being held, Hulk.
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I love his face in the first one. “This is really stupid. This is a stupid, bad idea. I’m going to do a really really stupid thing.”
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A/B/O AU. Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

Mind the cut :)

A gentle touch to his shoulder pulled him out of the semi-haze of hibernation. Tony peeled his eyelids up slowly and tried to focus. Steve was a warm weight pressed again him, and their mingled pheromones worked like a blanket. Tony’s mouth was uncomfortably dry. He worked his tongue uselessly against the roof of his mouth, hearing the soft smacking sounds as unexpectedly sharp the way video game sound effects sometimes were.

“Tony?” Bruce touched him on the shoulder again. The contact was fleeting and hesitant.

Making a soft mewling sound, Steve snuggled further into Tony’s chest. He ended up with his face buried in Tony’s armpit, took a deep breath, and blew it out in a ticklish stream. Tony looked up to see Bruce looming over the back of the couch, though he was obviously doing his best to be the least loom-y as possible. Tony blinked at him for a few seconds, trying to clear the haziness out of his eyes without needing to release his grip on the back of Steve’s neck.

He felt like he should not be so comfortable perched on the edge of the couch without being able to move for fear of waking his teammate, but he’d never been so comfortable in his life. It was the drifting, swaddled, floaty feeling that he’d been searching for in chemical form during his twenties and had never found. Why had he always refused heat sharing, again…?

“Tony, I really need you to focus on me for a second. Do you need a stimulant?” Bruce offered unhappily, holding up a syringe.

That cleared the last of the cobwebs. He felt tension seeping back into his shoulders and the muscles along his spine. “No. What did you find?”

“According to his blood work, he’s an omega,” Bruce reported, waving his hand over Steve’s sleeping body. “I can’t say what his internal biology looks like without more testing, but his o-levels are off the charts. Usually, he runs about A-93. Right now he’s at O-97, Tony. I’ve never met anyone with o-levels that high.”

Tony frowned, processing the numbers and syllables through his frighteningly slow brain. Oh, yeah, that would be why he refused to share heats. Biology being its bitchy self. He had to struggle to swallow, and Bruce disappeared for a second. He came back with a bottle of water, flicked the top off, and held it down for Tony. In the back of his head, he was very aware of how infuriating he should have found the notion of being bottle-fed, but all he could think about was relief for his aching throat. Relief, and not having to let go of Steve. He stretched his neck up and sealed his lips around the mouth of the bottle, sucking hard.

Bruce pulled it away from him before he was done and got a snarl for his efforts, but the water didn’t return. Tony glared at him, but he already felt a little waterlogged, and it probably wasn’t a great idea for him to have any more. He just wanted it.

“I don’t know how this has happened,” Bruce explained, setting the bottle down on the floor, “but he is going into heat. Obviously. I’m still waiting for a few results back, but so far all the tests just show that he’s a perfectly healthy omega in pre-heat.” He shifted his feet and scrunched up his face, fingers picking at the back of the couch. “And I think it’s putting you into rut.”

“Fuck that so hard,” Tony hissed. “No.”

(keep reading)

Bruce’s smile was wan, but tinged with real humor. “Can’t say no to biology, Tony.”

“The hell I can’t. In my workshop, behind the Iron Man pop art, there’s a safe. Jarvis will open it for you. There’s a heat interrupter and a rut interrupter.” Disturbed his agitation, Steve started shifting and nibbling on Tony’s chest. Tony stroked a hand absently down his neck, ignoring Bruce’s startled expression. Interrupters weren’t supposed to be accessible to anyone outside of an emergency room, but Tony wasn’t about to let something petty like the law stop him from having supplies on hand.

“Is that a good idea?” Bruce asked. His brows were scrunched together and his lips had pulled into a tiny knot of worry that worked back and forth across his face. Interrupters were for emergencies only, and generally only used to stop someone from hurting themselves if they were going into heat or rut after being involved in an accident.

“He doesn’t have any consent forms on files,” Tony pointed out. “Without them, the only thing we can do is lock him in a room and let him suffer through it alone. Do you really want to try that on a supersoldier? I’m having trouble thinking straight and we’re still in pre-heat. Anyone who’s even slightly A-ten in a five block radius is going to be pounding on the door.”

It was a gross exaggeration, but it got his point across. Bruce nodded after another moment’s thought, and then raked a hand through his hair, and headed for the elevator. The interrupter would be a temporary measure at best, and Tony wasn’t even sure it would work with the serum. Most drugs cleared out of his system so quickly that they were effectively useless. The interrupter might go the way of the morphine as far as Steve’s militantly regulated body was concerned. Tony’s best hope was that it would buy them just enough time to get him on a blocker and figure out what was wrong with him.

When Bruce returned, he had an interrupter in either hand, thumbs nervously resting on the injectors. They had the same form as an epi-pen, though heat interrupters were yellow and rut interrupters were green where epi-pens were orange. Even though the colors were fairly obvious, Bruce examined each one carefully before setting the blue tip of the interrupter to Tony’s thigh. He checked it again before depressing the green button, and then repeated the process on Steve while Tony’s hindbrain was still struggling with the shock of the injection.

Steve jerked at the sudden spike of pain, a hiss turning quickly into a yowl of indignation. Tony got a hand around him and held on until Steve’s own conscious brain kicked in. He looked around in obvious confusion as the interrupter did its job.

“What..?” he mumbled, pushing himself up on one elbow and sweeping his eyes down Tony’s body, and then twisting to look up at Bruce. He saw the interrupters in Bruce’s hands and frowned.

They were still tangled together, and now that the pheromones were clearing out of the air, Tony was acutely aware of the pain in his shoulder where he’d been laying on it. He stretched his neck, wincing at the sharp stab in his collarbone.

“I suspect magic,” Tony told him helpfully.

“Mr. Barnes has returned to the tower,” Jarvis announced. “He would like to know ‘what the freaking fuck is the goddamn emergency,’ and why he is not allowed in the common room.”

Tony tested the idea of having another alpha in his space. It still made him prickle uncomfortably, but he didn’t think it would result in the two of them tussling around the floor. Steve watched the side of his face with a helpless kind of worry. Tony couldn’t interpret if it was the idea of not being able to see Barnes, or the idea of Tony allowing another alpha into what had effectively become their den.

“Vent the room,” Tony said finally. The interrupters would temporarily – in Steve’s case maybe very temporarily – stop them from producing pheromones, but the room was still choked in them. He heard the atmovents come online, and for a moment they were caught in a storm. Vents in the floor pumped a highly oxygenated mix into the space, while the vents above sucked the air out. It would pass through a dozen filters, and then be released outside.

His head started to clear almost immediately. He sucked in a deep breath of the oxygen rich air, and then set about untangling himself. Steve clutched at him briefly, but didn’t protest as Tony wiggled out from their nest and sat upright. Tony stretched, and Steve seemed to press more deeply into the cushions. Being interrupted was never fun – Tony should know – and the sense of loss was both immediate and acute. Tony hesitated only a moment before reaching out to put a hand on Steve’s waist. Steve hid his face in a throw pillow.

“Okay,” Tony said with a sigh once the vents had clicked off. “Let him in.”

The elevator doors opened immediately, which meant that Barnes had probably been button-mashing and arguing with Jarvis the whole time. He stalked into the room, looking pissy and rumpled. He was still wearing his field gear, including the tight black sleeve that covered his prosthetic, and a black leather glove. Tony shifted closer to Steve without meaning to, automatically placing himself between Steve and Barnes, but at least he hadn’t started growling. Steve burrowed further into the pillow.

“What the hell?” Barnes demanded. “Do you know how long it took us to set that mission up? I swear to God, if it gets blown and this was just another one of your fucking pranks, Stark –” He froze when he finally turned to look at Tony and noticed Steve trying to disappear into the couch cushions. “Oh, hell. Steve?”

Steve made an unhappy noise and curled his knees up, unintentionally tucking himself around Tony’s hips. Barnes scented the air, and then frowned. His eyes flicked up to Bruce, who was still holding the interrupters in hand like he’d been caught with a murder weapon.

“Hell and goddamnit,” Barnes said. He used his teeth to pry the glove off his prosthetic and spit it out. Pulling a hair tie off his wrist, he raked his hair back and quickly flipped it into a messy ponytail. Eyeing Tony carefully, he got down on his knees and scooted over to the couch. “Steve? You conscious in there?”

“We think it’s magic,” Tony managed finally, trying to tell his body to calm the hell down. It felt like all his muscles had twisted into a spasm all at once. He was coiled and disturbingly ready to smack Barnes on the face. The back of his throat itched like he was trying to hiss.

“It ain’t magic,” Barnes said. He kept his eyes on Tony as he reached out carefully for Steve’s wrist.

Tony aborted a motion to grab him. He curled his hand into a fist and brought it back to his lap, and then grabbed onto his pant leg for extra insurance. Barnes set a gentle hand on Steve’s arm and tugged slightly. Steve huffed out a resigned sigh before surfacing from the cushions.

“You gonna’ live?”

Steve glowered at Barnes, and then yanked his arm back and pushed himself up to a seated position. Tony wasn’t inclined to move, so Steve had to squirm around him. He ended up sitting on Tony’s other side, effectively separating him from Barnes, which Tony did not mind in the slightest.

“I have a feeling that you two know what’s going on here?” Bruce hazarded as the silence stretched.

“Yeah,” Barnes sighed. “We do.”
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dailychrisevans:

[x]
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Two updates in one day. :)

Part: 1, 2, 3, 4

June 22, 1943

Steve held two fingers against the cotton pad and folded his arm up to apply pressure to the tiny wound. The nurse slid the last vial of blood into a case, gave him a professional smile, and held out a strip of tape. She taped the cotton down, picked up the case, and walked out without a word. Steve kept pressure on the puncture and waited, making no attempt to get out of the chair. He knew the drill with large blood draws, and it wasn’t the first time he’d lost what felt like a quarter of his blood supply to a series of tests.

“How are you feeling, Steve?” Erskine asked as he rounded the corner, his face buried in a file. He flipped one page up, glanced over at Steve, and let the page drop. He smiled kindly, and waited. It was rare, in Steve experience, for a doctor to ask him how he was feeling and actually expect an answer.

“Like I just lost a few pounds.” Steve pressed gingerly at the puncture and released the pressure.

Reaching into one jacket pocket, Erskine pulled out a Hershey’s bar and handed it over. Steve took it with a smile, flicking one forefinger across the top. They’d never had much growing up, but his mom had always made sure he had a treat after the long, and frequently painful doctor’s visits. He doubted Erskine was trying to give him a treat as much as just replenishing his energy. Steve unwrapped the bar and broke off a piece. He offered the rest of the bar back to Erskine, but the older man waved him off.

Erskine sat in the stool across from Steve’s chair. “Your O-levels are very high,” he said, folding the file closed and adjusting his glasses. “Very high.”

Steve shrugged. “Doesn’t mean much.”

“On the contrary. Pure omegas are rare, and an omega with your ratings would be highly sought after.” He tipped his head to examine Steve thoughtfully. Steve was used to it - not many people believed that he was a pure omega with as sick as he was on a good day. He’d had more than one doctor give their results a skeptical look while explaining to him that the reason he’d never gone into heat was because he was underweight and unhealthy. They usually explained that to him no matter what issue he’d been driven into the office first, even though he’d never once asked. “Try to take it easy and eat some fatty foods,” they would tell him, as if it was that simple for a poor omega from a poor family in a poor neighborhood. “Sure,” he’d tell them, and go right back to work.

“It’s some kind of genetic fluke. My mom was an omega, my dad was an alpha, so it just worked out that way.”

“You don’t think there is something remarkable in it?” Erskine asked curiously. “I have never personally met someone with O-levels as high as yours are.”

“I might as well be a neutral. I’ve never gone into heat, I’m not healthy. I’m creative, but I’m not really any more empathic or soothing than the next fella.” Steve shrugged again. “I’m okay with what I am, but my levels never mattered to me. Really, I just feel like a normal guy.”

An amused smile stretched across Erskine’s lips. “Normal is not a word I would use to describe you, my friend.”

Steve took a bite of the sweet chocolate and let it melt on his tongue. He managed a smile, and didn’t say neither would anyone else.

~*~

(keep reading)

His breath was loud with the chamber closed around him, every hitch, hiss, and wheeze echoing in the tight space. Steve tried to concentrate on keeping his breath steady and blocking out the pungent scent of iron. His neck was warm from the penicillin shot, and his limbs felt weak like he was recovering from the flu. It was a feeling he knew well, but the familiarity of it was no comfort with the walls so close he could almost believe he was in a coffin.

“Steve?” Erskine called through the chamber door. “Are you alright in there?”

Steve drew in a shaky, iron flavored breath, and replied, “Is it too late to go to the bathroom?”

Erskine didn’t reply, but Steve did actually feel an alarming pressure in his bladder. He couldn’t possibly have anything to give after eighteen hours without liquids, but with all the ways his body had disappointed him over the years he wouldn’t be surprised if it managed that indignity on top of everything else.

The first flicker of light made his vision go white. Steve slammed his eyes shut and had to grab onto the chamber padding to keep from rubbing at them. He sucked in a breath, and then another. His skin started to tingle like his entire body had fallen asleep. The light flared again, searing right through his closed eyelids. Heat flushed through him in a wave, so fast and so intense that he was left shivering and gagging as it receded. Another pulse and another, each one brighter, lasting longer, and agony followed in quick flashes like hammer blows. The strikes were so white-hot, and so quick that he managed to keep his mouth shut for a long time by virtue of the pain vanishing by the time he’d processed it. The longer the light flash, the longer the burst of agony, until it wasn’t a burst anymore but a constant flood.

He screamed. He hadn’t meant to, but it tore out of his chest like a living thing, and he couldn’t put it back. He heard Erskine call for a stop, but Steve turned the next shriek of pain into a sharp No!

“I can do this!” he screamed, and he meant it, but mostly he meant he had to do it. Something was wrong with all his bones. They felt like liquid and steel shards. He was soaking wet, and he knew without opening his eyes that it wasn’t sweat, but blood. A stretching pain tore into his side and then went lax. Steve realized in a hazy sort of disbelief that his skin had torn and the flutter of movement he felt against his hip was not fabric.

A strange floating sensation lifted him away from the horror. He was still aware of the pain, he heard himself screaming, but he was distant from it somehow, separate. Steve made a decision in that moment of sightless clarity – if the experiment was not a success, he would let it kill him before he screamed at them to stop. Surrounded by the scent of his own blood, feeling the hot air on exposed muscles, aware of his bones shifting and growing, he didn’t want to imagine what it would be like to stop in the middle of the maddening transformation.

It all seemed to come to a halt and Steve was left for a subjective eternity in soul-rending pain as he hit some kind of wall and just stopped, a gangly mass of exposed bones, torn muscles and skin, raw and on fire with agony. He felt a moment of gibbering terror that the experiment had failed without taking his life with it, or he’d been dragged to hell when he wasn’t paying attention and this would be his punishment for challenging the natural order.

The moment passed like the first gasp of air after being submerged too long. It burned, but the pain was different. It was a healing, cleansing pain, and the itch and ache of flesh knitting back together, just all of it was so fast. Steve was left panting, completely at a loss for how much time had passed while he was under the light. Water swirled around him, pouring over the back of his head and quickly filling up around his feet. He felt the slick gore washed away as the last vestiges of a cocoon set in a current.

~*~

The victory felt hollow. He sat in the same chair with the same nurse quietly drawing blood, but the chair was smaller, and the nurse smiled more, and he was very aware of Agent Carter standing in the background with her arms crossed. She’d glared at the nurse when the nurse had tried to talk to him. Steve hadn’t been listening, but he did notice that the nurse’s voice was pitched higher than it had been, and she smelled different too.

He crinkled his nose as she left, automatically putting two fingers to the gauze bandage, and curling his arm up to put pressure on it.

“Sure you don’t want a little more?” he asked, glancing up at Peggy.

She gave him a look that crossed somewhere between apologetic and subdued. Rather than answering him, she said, “The last samples of the serum are in your blood. If there’s any hope of recreating Dr. Erskine’s serum, it’s in your veins.”

Steve didn’t say anything. When he was pulled out of the chamber, Peggy had asked, “How do you feel?”

What he’d wanted to say was, destroy the serum, don’t ever do this to anyone else. It’s Hell in a bottle, it’s not worth it. He’d managed to close his mouth just in time, because Erskine’s eyes had been on him like he was a holy relic, and Steve’d had no way of know if it would be worth it. He’d had every intention of pulling Erskine aside as soon as they were in private and warning him about the transformation process. Steve still wasn’t sure he hadn’t lost his mind in that chamber.

It was all a moot point, but Steve could still the feel the pressure of Erskine’s finger on his chest like a ton of bricks. A good man.

“What now?” he asked instead of saying any of that.

“Now… Howard and I go back to the front, we carry on,” Peggy said, the only sign of her regret hiding in the tightened corners of her lips. He didn’t know her well enough to ask her if she was really okay, but something told him she was a lot more upset than she was letting on. It was something about the way she was holding her shoulders, the way she smelled. He frowned and drew in a surreptitious breath.

“And me?” he asked distractedly. She was… copper, gun oil, roses, and black tea. He could smell her laundry soap, the powder in her hair, the faint scent of her body odor – musk, and the sour smell of exertion. He missed her answer and jerked back when she leaned forward to snap her fingers in front of his face. The sound cracked in his ears so loudly that they started to ring. She frowned and leaned down to look into his eyes.

“Are you alright?”

He jerked back from her breath, peppermint over canned tuna. He put a hand over his mouth and nose and she pulled back, looking vaguely offended. He held the opposite hand up in an apology.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” he rushed. “I’m… things smell… a lot.”

“Things?” she asked, one eyebrow hiked, eyes narrowed in consideration. “What sorts of things?”

Steve shrugged and shook his head in confusion. “I don’t… everything? You smell like roses and gunmetal.” He glanced at her, sure that he’d stuck his foot in his mouth again, but she looked almost flattered. “And sad,” he blurted out, “You smell sad.”

Peggy watched him for several seconds, and then reached up and dragged her hair over one shoulder, tilting her chin to expose her throat. She stretched her neck until her ear rested on her shoulder. Steve felt his spine uncurling, his chest expanding, and there was a noise somewhere, a low, rumbling growl.

Straightening up, Peggy stepped away and clapped her hands sharply together. “Enough!” she said. She hadn’t shouted, but her voice cut through the haze. Steve shook himself and finally realized that the sound was him. It was his chest vibrating, his throat warm with the noise. He put his fingers up to his throat and looked up at her in uncomprehending shock.

“Well, that’s interesting,” she said, examining him. “I thought you were an omega?”

“I am,” Steve said. He looked down at his hands, curling and uncurling his fingers. The truth dawned on him slowly. He felt sick to his stomach with impossible, certainly knowledge. “I was,” he corrected faintly, knowing it was true the moment he’d said it.

He’d never cared about his numbers. They just meant that he’d never get a job outside of an office, and that every day he worked after he turned thirty would be a small scandal. They meant that even if he’d been perfectly healthy, he would have still been 4F’ed out every recruitment station in America. He’d never felt like an omega, as much as he imagined anyone could tell without a point of reference, but he’d never not felt like an omega either. If Erskine had warned him before the serum that he would step out of the chamber as an alpha, he didn’t think it would have especially bothered him. He also wouldn’t have seen it as any kind of perk, except maybe the idea of not having total strangers expect a submission out of him anymore.

So why did he suddenly feel like he was missing something?
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For my bingo square “sex pollen.” Challenger @miss-kitty-fantastico

Watch the cut!

All in all, Tony was disappointed. With rumors of a super thinktank trying to combine all the worst aspects of sodium pentothal, E, and alcohol, Tony had expected more. They’d been hard to find, he’d give them that – as in digitally hard to find. Out in the non-digital world, they were operating out of a strip mall on the main thoroughfare in a tiny township in Minnesota unfortunately named Embarrass.

Since the Avengers trooping through Small Town, Anywhere tended to call a lot of attention, they’d driven from Duluth in a rental van. By the time they pulled into the cramped parking lot, Tony was ready to put a stylus through Clint’s eye. If he had to hear one more chorus of “99 bottles of beer on the wall/ Shoot one down, it shatters on the ground,” ad infinitum, he was going to throttle someone. Since they were mere yards away from a bad guy he could theoretically throttle, he didn’t try too hard to suppress the urge. Nat and Steve had both fallen asleep in the middle row almost as soon as they doors had shut, because they had that whole ‘can sleep anywhere’ thing in common. Sam had earbuds stuffed into his ears, though Tony’s had mysteriously disappeared out of his bag. He felt an acute sense of betrayal.

“Karmic pay back,” Rhodey said, climbing out of the driver’s seat. “Do you remember that trip from Boston to New York your sophomore year?” He smiled sweetly and held out a twenty. Clint snatched it out of his fingers and blew Tony a kiss on his way past, surreptitiously rubbing his jaw.

“It’s not karma if you interfere,” Tony said, but he was secretly impressed. Putting up with three complete rounds of the beer song just to get Tony back for an unfortunate road trip two decades after the fact was dedication.

Rhodey shrugged. “What can I say? Sometimes karma happens to you. Sometimes you’re the karma that happens to someone else.”

“I’m going to remember this,” Tony warned him, snugging his baseball cap down further over his eyes. He guessed that as far as ‘We’re tourists, just passing through,’ disguises went, they probably wouldn’t pass muster for long. He checked his phone, and then looked up. According to his scan, nothing in the area had so much as security camera to its name.

The smallest space on the end of the strip didn’t even have proper signage. When they drew closer, he saw that a set of letters had been frosted onto the glass in what was probably 12-pt font. Dionysus Labs. Original.

Steve, annoyingly alert after his ninety-odd minute nap, casually pulled the door open, and then stuck his foot in front of it and gestured everyone else through. Tony kept his phone up, sweeping the area with infrared as he went. He’d done a satellite pass over the area less than an hour before, and there had only been two heat signatures in the building. He wasn’t surprised to see the same two human-shaped blobs on the other side of the back wall. In two weeks of monitoring, he’d never seen more than two human-shaped blobs.

The reception area was a closet-sized space that they crowded to capacity. It was complete with ugly industrial carpet, three folding chairs under a painting of a lake that might have been stolen from a motel, and a reception desk about the size of a podium. It was empty of even a bored receptionist, which made sense, since there didn’t even appear to be a phone. Rhodey leaned around the desk, feeling underneath the shelves for a weapon, and then shook his head.

Nat put her back to the cheap plywood wood and waited for Clint to give her a nod. She flicked the door knob, and pushed the door sharply inward. It banged against the opposite wall, though the sound was almost drowned out by the startled shouts from within. Clint ran in with his sidearm drawn, leading Steve, Sam, and Rhodey after him. Tony stayed in the waiting room and kept an eye on his screens. Nothing was putting off any troubling energy, and the floor seemed quite solid.

Steve stuck his head back out the door. His lips were twisted in a bemused grimace. “It’s clear,” he said, gesturing Tony in with a twitch of his fingers.

“I am disappointed,” Tony said, following him in. “I was going to be disappointed anyway, but I assumed there would be something for me to do.” The only reason he hadn’t trundled in with the rest of them was that he’d thought a high-budget operation like this one had to be hiding a few nasty tech surprises under their very mundane exterior.

(keep reading)

The room beyond was… a lab. It had been outfitted with metal tables that were stacked with the usual medical lab detritus. Half of the space had been converted into a sterile room, and a ventilation hood took up most of the real estate in the opposite corner. The eye wash station and chemical shower had clearly posted instructions and warnings, and there was a red lab safety handbook on the shelf backed with OSHA posters and cheesy I Am Safe! Graphics of a pencil figure in a hardhat giving the thumbs up. There was a picture of a chambered nautilus on one cabinet, the Milky Way galaxy next to it, and a boxy spiral across the room. Sam was in the process of taking down an enlarged poster of Dr. Foster’s most recent appearance in Reviews of Modern Physics. Thor would have never forgiven them for leaving it.

“Wow. Now I’m… Now I’m just depressed,” Tony decided. Two youngish men in lab coats had already been handcuffed and were slumped in lab stools, still wearing their eye protection. “I mean… I approve of your lab safety, with the exception of the paper thin door that anyone with reasonable hand-eye coordination and baseball bat could get through, but. Wow.”

One of the men sighed dejectedly. He was wearing a plaid shirt with a no-kidding pocket protector. Tony couldn’t decide if he was wearing it with his expensive, tailored khakis as nerd-chic or not. “We were finally getting results,” he mourned.

“We were going to be so rich,” the other added. “I was going to go to Tahiti.”

Tony exchanged a baffled look with Rhodey, who only shrugged.

“We have got to get a better class of supervillain,” Sam said.

Pocket Protector perked up. “Supervillain? Think they’ll write a book about us?”

Rolling his eyes, Sam dropped a heavy hand to the back of the guy’s neck to propel him out of the stool. “No.”

Natasha grabbed the other Supervillain Hopeful by the arm and gave him one of those really creepy Russian doll smiles. “You and I need to talk,” she said.

The guy looked pretty happy with that idea. Tony guessed that they’d have an itemized list of the entire chain of operations by the time the van made it back to Duluth.

“We’ll take these two back in the van,” Sam said, giving his captive a squeeze on the back of the neck that made the man bunch his shoulders up like a cartoon turtle. “Quinjet should be here to help you transport all this…” he waved a hand around the orderly lab with a grimace. “Stuff.”

Tony tossed him a salute and opened an app. He hummed as he tapped away at the commands while Clint, Nat, and Sam lead their docile captives out of the door. Satisfied with the results, he pointed the infrared at the floor to look for a secret lair, occasionally stamping on the floor in likely places.

“This is absurd,” he decided finally. “There is really… nothing. It took us two months to find this place.”

“Well,” Steve ventured, “it did keep them under the radar for more than a year. There’s something to be said about low-tech when you’re going up against Iron Man.” He was thumbing through a binder of pages in sheet protectors, so he didn’t see Tony preening. Tony could just barely make out the words ‘Employee Handbook’ between Steve’s fingers. He shook the binder slightly and held up a page. “They had a 401k plan, and health benefits. They get more vacation days than I do!”

Rhodey snorted. “Guess we’re in the wrong line of work.” He was crouched down beside the transparent door of the sterile room. Tapping one knuckle on the Plexiglas, he noted, “This is more like what I expected to find here. This is four inches thick and bullet proof.”

“Ooo,” Tony said, hurrying around the central table to Rhodey’s side. “Boobie trapped?”

Before Rhodey could answer, his phone went off. He settled back on his heels to answer it, and then instantly jerked the phone away from his ear. ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ played loudly in the background and Clint shouted, “I’m never letting you pay me for favors ever again!”

Tony grabbed Rhodey’s wrist to get at the phone. “If he’s paying you for it, it’s not a favor.”

“Fuck you so hard, Stark!” Clint shouted over the chorus. Tony could hear other voices shouting in the background, and then the van’s sliding door opened. It slammed shut a second later, cutting off the caterwauling of Billy Ray Cyrus and the dismayed shouts of the two unfortunate prisoners. “It better turn off,” he huffed into the phone.

Tony shrugged. “Eh.” He loved high-tech cars with their very hackable computers.

Groaning, Clint said, “Do not pull me into whatever weird prank game you have going with Rhodes, Stark, I swear you’ll regret it.”

Tony fluttered his eyelashes at Rhodey. “Hey, blame Rhodey. He’s the one who got you into this.”

Leaning on Tony’s shoulders, Steve grabbed Rhodey’s arm just under Tony’s grip and pulled up. Rhodey scowled, and Steve ignored him. “Just leave those two locked in the car for a few minutes, and then send Nat after them.”

“Torture tactics? From Captain America?” Clint gasped. “I am shocked. Shocked and severely disappointed.”

“Pleasure to be of service,” Steve said warmly, and then released Rhodey’s arm and levered himself back up without even using Tony’s shoulder for balance. That kind of core muscle response was absolutely not fair. Before Tony could say as much, Steve’s Running Man ringtone went off. He stepped away to put it to his ear.

“Sam -… I’m sure it will turn off eventually,” he said, laughing. “I wouldn’t, if I were you. Well, it’s your life.” He covered the mouthpiece with one hand and leaned over to ask, “You are going to turn that off when they start traveling, right?”

Tony made a vague sound, already more invested in the keypad to get into the sterile room than Clint’s comeuppance. He could feel Rhodey’s eyes on the side of his face and guessed that there was a pre-emptive retaliatory prank already in the works in case Tony had something in mind for him. Tony was going to let him stew in it for a while.

Snagging Rhodey’s wrist again, Tony said, “Hey – stick your head back in the van and say ‘one, one, two’ please.”

“Oh, please, is it?” Clint grumbled, but the vague thumping of music grew louder. “Hey, asswipes! One, one, two,” he shouted over the music. The car door slammed, cutting Billy Ray off at ‘- And if you tell my –‘ “I’m not telling you what he said until you promise to turn that off.”

“I promise I’ll turn it off,” Tony said, pointedly not including when.

“He said, ‘four.’ Mean anything to you?”

Tony hummed, but Rhodey was already keying in the sequence before he could say a word. The door popped open with a hiss. Tony groaned. “Why? I am so..! Two months.”

Steve looked in between them, confused. He frowned at the open door. “What just happened here?”

Rhodey waved vaguely toward the posters of spirals dotted around the room between safety posters. “Zero-one-one-two-five. Fibonacci sequence. I am embarrassed for these guys.”

“They sure picked some good real estate then,” Steve said with a grin. He bent over to open a lower cabinet, his face briefly appearing somewhere around his knees. He saw Tony watching him and winked, mouth stretching into a devilish smile.

“I see what you’re doing,” Tony told him, just so he didn’t think he was getting away with it.

“I do not,” Rhodey said, “but whatever it is, stop.”

Steve chuckled and bent his knees, folding smoothly into a crouch. He started pulling out boxes of pipettes, shaking each of them like they were Christmas presents. Tony finally yanked his eyes away from the motion of Steve’s shoulders and followed Rhodey into the sterile room. A row of incubators were on against one wall, the shadow of petri dishes visible behind the dark glass. On the opposite wall was another ventilation hood, and the center of the room was taken up by a workspace and a bank of computers. He glanced up to see five industrial ventilation units in the ceiling – for the size of the room, he would have expected only one, or two. He frowned. Between the heavy-duty sterile room and the ventilation, they must have made a lot of progress over the latest version of the compound they’d encountered.

Rhodey was already taking pictures of the setup, so Tony perched on a lab stool and jiggled the mouse until the computer woke up. The username had been saved, so he tried the Fibonacci sequence again, and then a few others. At least they were a bit smarter with their computer security – not smart enough to keep him out of the system, but smarter than they had been with any other aspect of the operation.

“You know,” Rhodey said, snapping a picture of the incubators, “If it was this difficult to find the lab jockeys, figuring out who bank rolled them is going to be a pain in the ass.” He turned a circle, frowning at the sterile room. “Where are the rats?”

Tony plugged into the computer tower and then looked around again, himself. “Huh.” He frowned. He would have expected a whole wall of test subjects. Shivers skittered down his spine. “They’re either testing offsite…”

“Or they’re not testing on animals,” Rhodey finished for him.

The lock screen vanished and Tony dropped his head into his hand with a helpless laugh. Rhodey came over to stand behind him. He rested one hand on Tony’s shoulder and leaned down to look over the last document their intrepid chemists had been working on.

“… They were testing it on themselves?” Rhodey said incredulously. He reached over Tony’s shoulder to click through the open tabs at the bottom. One was an Amazon page displaying search results for ‘soft stuff,’ two were lab results that they both looked over quickly, but neither of them were chemists. Bruce would have to do the heavy lifting on those. The last tab was a video dated the evening before. Rhodey’s hand curled away from the mouse, and then reluctantly pushed play.

Pocket Protector sat in front of the camera in a hotel room, looking stoned out of his mind. His mouth was reddened from either a lot of rough kisses or an allergic reaction, his eyes were glassy and red, and his shirt was half unbuttoned. It had been pulled open and left that way, his lab coat pulled haphazardly over the top of it. Judging by the dark smear of a bruise under his collarbone, Tony was guessing that he hadn’t been experiencing an allergic reaction.

He stared at the camera with a distant, stupid smile on his face. A woman walked across the frame, only visible from the neck down, and not wearing anything except an equally rumpled lab coat. She dragged her nails down the back of his neck and he shivered visibly, almost violently, before slumping back against her and giggling.

“Thanks for the fun time, sugar,” she said. She leaned down to kiss his forehead, but a curtain of auburn hair hid her face from the camera. “Let me know if you want to do it again sometime.”

“’Kay,” Pocket Protector said drowsily. He turned in his chair to watch her pick up her clothes and walk into the bathroom. The door shut, and then the shower turned on. Pocket Protector turned back to the screen and made an exaggeratedly excited face. He bit one knuckle, slightly muffling his giggling. “Oh… my God,” he said, and then scrabbled around the desk until he came up with a vial of white powder. “Screw AIM, we’re taking this commercial. Fucking fuck. So much fucking, Matt, so much fucking.”

“Okay, well, that was helpful,” Rhodey said, pausing the video. He stepped away with his cellphone already out. “Fucking AIM,” he said under his breath as he left the sterile room.

Shaking his head, Tony scrubbed his hand across his face. They may as well have just left behind an envelope with a big label that read, “EVIDENCE OF ALL MY WRONGDOINGS RIGHT HERE.” Considering how well everything else in the lab had been labeled, Tony wouldn’t have been especially surprised. He clicked through the computer while he downloaded the hard drive, finding detailed records on the entire process. One of the Viagra Duo was apparently a neat freak, because Tony found a spreadsheet outlining every conversation they’d ever had with their benefactors.

Tony started to laugh again. “I am completely stunned that you can be so incompetently competent,” he told the screen.

“Having lots of luck?” Steve asked, peering curiously into the room.

“We can call the interrogation off,” Tony said. “Don’t even bother to give them the yellow legal pad and the pen. We’ve already got their confessions here.” He held up his USB drive for illustration. “Though it looks like what they came up with is more along the lines of fun-time recreational drug than hardcore interrogation chemical.”

“I heard Rhodey muttering about AIM on his way out the door?”

Tony pulled up the spreadsheet and leaned back so Steve could read it over his shoulder. Steve barked out a startled laugh and slapped a hand over his face. “I don’t know who’s worse. These two, or whatever idiot at AIM hired them.”

“If only all the villains kept such impeccable records,” Tony agreed, leaning subtly into Steve’s chest. “We’d be out of a job.”

“We could retire,” Steve said with a pleased hum. “We could move somewhere warm, with a beach. I could learn to surf.”

Twisting around, Tony demanded, “How have you never learned to surf? We lived in California.”

Steve leaned down and nipped at Tony’s neck in mild rebuke. He nosed under Tony’s jaw and set a soft kiss on his pulse point. “Do you know how to surf?” he asked innocently.

Tony sniffed. “Of course not. I’m not a supersoldier.”

“Of course. Only supersoldiers surf.” He tightened his arms around Tony’s chest and rested his chin on the top of his head. “Mellow recreational drug, hm?”

“Seems to just make for good sex,” Tony replied, wiggling suggestively. “Could be fun.”

Steve chuckled. “Too bad we’re more responsible than our friends, here.”

At the sound of the lab door opening, Steve straightened up, and stepped away. Rhodey came back in, shaking his head. He pointed at the computer, not mentioning the on-mission cuddling he’d certainly seen. “I don’t suppose they mentioned any useful names?”

Sliding backwards off the stool, Tony motioned to the still-open spreadsheet. “The AIM representative was at least smart enough to give them a codename. Mr. Wine.”

“With this group, I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t a codename at all.” He shook his head, and then leaned back. “Bruce should be here in a few minutes. Let’s start packing this junk up.”
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