As expected, Tony gave in first, and looked pretty sullen; especially when I princess carried him all the way back to the Lodge, as I was already mentally calling the SHIELD facility where we were hosting our little training camp. He'd made pretty good distance for a guy with a handful of shrapnel creeping toward his heart; better than I'd have done anyway. Banner decided to quit about halfway through; but waved off my offer to bring him back too; he seemed plenty comfortable out in the woods, so I just left him a tent and told him to come back any time he felt like it. Clint and Natasha actually made it the full distance, but elected to go seek out a motel for some beds to fall into rather than chance the journey back. So, as the sun was falling, I fell into step beside Steve; who seemed to be continuing out of a sense of obligation more than anything. I'd really stacked his backpack, enough so that the journey was hard running even for him; but I still needed to take heavy fifteen foot horizontal hops to keep up with his laser-steady running gait, the uneven terrain troubling him not at all despite the hundreds of pounds he was carrying on his back.
"Hey Steve- stop for a second, I wanna ask you something." I said when we were about halfway back. Might as well ask while I had him, I figured, and without Tony there to snark things up and make him less likely to hear me out.
He skidded to a stop; still bouncing on the balls of his feet as his system slowed down. He leaned against a tree a little, mopping sweat from his brow and panting for a while before nodding. "Sure thing Charud."
"I wanna borrow that shield of yours. Just for a while." I dropped, taking a swig of water and offering him the bottle, which he took and dumped over his face before he gulped down the rest of it and took a few more heavy breaths.
"That's a little bit sudden... I hope you won't be offended if I ask why. This thing is... well, it's personal." He said, reaching back and running a thumb along the rim; he'd brought it along even on top of his pack.
"No, I get it. If I had anything from a friend from before I got here, I'd want to hang onto it too. Trust me, I'm not going to lose it or break it. If I even could." I said. Vibranium was ridiculous stuff after all. "I want to see if an idea Tony and I have will work."
He stood up again, shouldering his heavy load, apparently having recovered most of the way already. "You and Tony? What the heck are you two planning on?" I told him. He let out a whistle. "That's... pretty out there. Even for this century. Even if it works, I don't think I can just hand the shield over whenever you want."
"No, I wouldn't expect you to. This is just an experiment. If it works out, then we'll know what we need."
"You think you can get more Vibranium?" He said, looking a little skeptical. "Howard said this was all there was left on the whole planet."
"This might be Tony's preconceptions talking, but I don't think Howard knew everything. If it is, then it is. But if it's not, then at least I'll know what to look for when I do manage to get back to space."
He laughed at that. "You know just when I think I'm starting to get used to living in the now, you go and say something like "Back to Space" like it's the most normal thing in the world. Okay. I'll let you have it as long as we're here. I trust you."
Not for the first time I felt vaguely uncomfortable at that expression. Steve was a great guy; probably TOO good if I was being honest. He made me feel kinda filthy just standing next to him. Like I should go plant a tree or save a cat from a tree. I clapped a hand on his shoulder and he nearly toppled, and I laughed, helping steady him. "You're a peach Steve, but careful you don't bruise. Come on, let's go rub it in Tony's smug face that he's the wimpiest Avenger."
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Tony'd had food flown in while we were on our way back so I held off from my promise; as Steve and I both wolfed down enough tacos to feed a small platoon. Steve hadn't even said a word, just passed Tony his shield and sat down to refuel almost the moment he got there. Tony shot me a curious look and I shrugged at him. He winced standing up, but apparently his tired legs wouldn't be enough to keep him from the workshop any longer. I packed a plate with extra fast food and hovered after him.
He fixed the shield into an apparatus he'd built out of parts he'd had shipped up ahead of us, almost all of them made out of that same weird off-gold alloy he used to build his suits; made sense that for such a high stress apparatus he'd go for the strongest stuff he could find, with the shield occupying the place of honor in the center. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together firmly, tucking his hands into a set of articulated gloves for extra-precise control of the robot arms that sprang to life around the machine and began to tighten everything down.
"You work fast Stark. I don't think any of this was here when we left."
"Well I needed to do something while the freaks of nature were running cross country in 100% humidity." he said, fixing things in place and attaching the power source; a suitcase sized Arc generator of a somewhat clunkier design than the sleek triangle he'd built into himself. "Hokay, test gravity deflector operation one." he said, recording himself as he wheeled his chair over to the main controls.
"Bounce the graviton particle beam, off the main deflector dish." I deadpanned over to him.
"That's the way we do things as we're makin' shit up as we wish." He singsonged back under his breath; flipping at least a dozen switches and then flipping a set of safety goggles down over his eyes. "Aaaand testing." he said, hitting the main switch.
There was a soft hissing sound, and I looked around, noticing nothing at the moment... no wait. There was a tiny bit of dust... I reached to one side and flicked a spare nut toward the machine, and before it reached it, it slowly parted ways with the floor and rose upward off the ground. I shot Tony a big, shit eating grin as he glared at me. "Hey, it's working! You really pulled it-" I started, before the whole machine suddenly jerked off the ground and shot up into the reinforced ceiling; where it began to pull plaster off and suck it in toward itself, covering the entire thing in a thick layer of white dust before it began to buckle in on itself with a loud sound of shearing metal. Tony hit the emergency stop, and it clanged back onto the floor; Cap's shield rolling comically away from it and swirling around on the floor with a solid ringing sound.
"...Well I'll be damned. Theory confirmed." Tony said as he pulled his goggles off, revealing a solid outline of bare skin where the swirling dust had failed to find him.
I looked down sheepishly, lamenting the loss of my beloved tacos.
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AN: here's a short one to tide you over. I ended up expanding the scene fairly significantly anyway so it's a decent clean break.